Griffin, F. (2022). Writings and Readings of the Pandemic: The Shadows Left Behind. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Pandemic Issue. April 2022.
Griffin, F. (2021). Finding Order in Meaning, Being, and Becoming through Memoir. The American Psychoanalyst. Volume 55, No. 1, 2021.
Griffin, F. (2020). The Need to Be Listened To: What to expect from online therapy sessions during the coronavirus pandemic. Psychoanalysis Unplugged-American Psychoanalytic Association/Psychology Today. March 31, 2020. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychoanalysis-unplugged/202003/the-need-be-listened
Griffin, F. (2020). Becoming of Use as an Analyst: Imagining Something that Was Never There Before. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 68:1, February 2020.
Griffin, F. (2019). What I Learned from Psychotherapy from Toni Morrison: A therapist’s lessons about patience, courage and the limits of understanding. Psychoanalysis Unplugged-American Psychoanalytic Association, August 28, 2019. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychoanalysis-unplugged/201908/what-i-learned-about-psychotherapy-toni-morrison
Griffin, F. (2019). Creative Writers as Our Other Psychoanalytic Teachers: An Interview of Rivka Galchen. The American Psychoanalyst, Issue 2, 2019.
Griffin, F. (2018). Book Review of Mutuality, Recognition, and the Self: Psychoanalytic Reflections, by C. Kieffer. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Volume 87, May, 2018, pp.
353-360.
Griffin, F. (2017). How Novels Help You Grieve: Works of fiction can reconnect us with deep emotional experiences. Psychoanalysis Unplugged-American Psychoanalytic Association, December 11, 2017.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychoanalysis-unplugged/201712/how-novels-help-you-grieve
Griffin, F. (2017). Book Review of Scary Old Sex, by Arlene Heyman. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Volume 65, Issue 5, pp. 911-919
Griffin, F. (2013). In Search of Lost Time in Psychological Space. American Imago, Vol. 70, No 1.
Griffin, F. (2010). Surviving the Way We Live: Narrative Medicine and Psychiatry, Newsletter of the North Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians, Spring 2010.
Griffin, F. (2009). Clinical Use of Imaginative Literature: Creative Reading and Creative Writing, Newsletter of the Dallas Psychoanalytic Center, Fall 2009.
Griffin, F. (2009). Constructing Ernest Jones (Book Review Essay: Freud’s Wizard: Ernest Jones and the Transformation of Psychoanalysis), International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Part 5:2009 CONTSTRUCTING ERNEST JONES.pdf1
Griffin, F. (2008). Psychoanalysis and narrative medicine, The American Psychoanalyst. New York: American Psychoanalytic Association, Winter issue 2008.
Griffin, F. (2008). The Fortunate Physician: Learning from Our Patients. Book chapter in Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine, P. Rudnytsky and R. Charon, editors. New York: SUNY Press, 2008.
Griffin, F. (2006). Teaching Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: Voices that Have Reach. Book Review Essay in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 54/4, 2006. Teaching Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy PDF
Griffin, F. (2005). Clinical Conversations between Psychoanalysis and Imaginative Literature, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXXIV, No. 2, April 2005. CLINICAL CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE PDF
Griffin, F. (2004). One Form of Self-analysis, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXXIII, July 2004. GRIFFIN – ONE FORM OF SELF‐ANALYSIS PDF
Griffin, F. (2004). The Fortunate Physician: Learning from Our Patients, Literature and Medicine, Volume 23, No. 2, Fall 2004. Fortunate Physician PDF
Griffin, F. and Paulsen, R. (2004). Conversations with Physicians about the Doctor-Patient Relationship, The American Psychoanalyst, Winter 2004.
NARRATIVE MEDICINE
Narrative medicine is an emergent discipline that focuses on the subjective experience of the patient, of the doctor, and of the physician-with-the-patient. The term “narrative” refers to a way of listening to patients in which physicians may come to hear the fuller “story” of the human being who is experiencing an illness. In this field physicians read stories, or narratives, written by published physician-authors about clinical experience and they write their own narratives about their experience with patients. In so doing, physicians not only come to know more comprehensively about their patients’ lives, but they also learn more about their own emotional reactions to their patients and thereby are able to be more responsive to them—to the benefit of patient and physician alike.
The practice of narrative medicine improves the physician’s capacity for listening, for self-awareness, and for self-reflection. Through narrative medicine doctors may be able to emotionally process—to “digest” and “metabolize”—the secondary trauma of working with patients who come for care in all conditions of distress, day in and day out, for years. This lessensphysician burn-out and improves physician satisfaction. Most importantly, it allows the physician to be more emotionally present with patients and enables him or her to better accompany them through their illnesses.
Like psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, narrative medicine is centrally involved with the doctor-patient relationship. And narrative medicine shares much in common with the process of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, in which patients and analysts/therapists are able to recognize and name feelings and put emotional experience into a context of more comprehensive understandings.
The following is an excerpt from a commentary by me in the Spring 2006 issue of the Permanente Journal.
Restoring Our Humanity: Our Intention to Heal
by Fred L. Griffin, M.D. 10, No. 1
Being a doctor can be such a lonely place to inhabit. Our task-oriented approaches to patient care can all too often reduce us to feeling more like two-dimensional characters in someone else’s story than three- and four-dimensional people in our own meaningful lives. Never has there been a time in the history of medicine when physicians have had a greater need to find meaning in what they do. When we translate clinical experience into written narratives, we bring to life the physician-patient relationships in which we live. The act of writing helps us to restore our own humanity, and the act of seeing ourselves with our patients on the written page reminds us of what led most of us into medicine in the first place. These stories both humanize the physician-patient encounter and make physicians feel more like the human beings they are than the “human-doings” they sometimes become. And it is only through being more fully human ourselves that we may convey convincingly to patients our intention to heal.
While at the University of Alabama School of Medicine in Birmingham, each year I offered a week-long Scholars Week course for third- and fourth-year medical students and another course for second-year medical students, titled: “Doctors’ Stories: Introduction to Narrative Medicine.”
Please see the following link to an article about the course in the 2006 Winter issue UAB Medicine, “Student Rounds: Medicine and the Arts” (pp 22-23): Click here to Download in PDF
Also when in Birmingham I led a monthly Narrative Medicine Discussion Group for UASOM faculty. In it physicians read and discuss the works of published physician-writers and write and reflect upon their own patient narratives.
Griffin, F. Surviving the Way We Live: Narrative Medicine and Psychiatry, Newsletter of the North Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians, Spring 2010
Griffin, F. Psychoanalysis and narrative medicine, The American Psychoanalyst. New York: American Psychoanalytic Association,
Winter issue 2008
Griffin, F. The Fortunate Physician: Learning from Our Patients. Book chapter in Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine, P. Rudnytsky and R. Charon,
editors. New York: SUNY Press, 2008
Griffin, F. The Fortunate Physician: Learning from Our Patients, Literature and Medicine, Volume 23, No. 2, Fall 2004 Click here to Download PDF format
Griffin, F. and Paulsen, R. Conversations with Physicians about the Doctor-Patient Relationship, The American Psychoanalyst, Winter 2004
Presentations in Narrative Medicine
Narrative Medicine with the Ward Team: Stories from Patient Care, Grand
Rounds, Department of Psychiatry, October 4, 2005
Narrative Medicine: Stories in Patient Care (with Waid Shelton, MD),
Grand Rounds Presentations at the University of Alabama School of Medicine in the following departments:
UASOM Department of Pulmonary Medicine, April 7, 2005
UASOM Department of Internal Medicine, August 10, 2005
UASOM Department of Pediatrics, June 1, 2006
UASOM Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, October 14, 2005
Writing and Telling Your Stories to improve the Art of Medicine. Workshop
sponsored by the Permanente Journal Atlanta, Georgia October 20, 2005
Narrative Medicine and Physician Satisfaction
William Carlos Williams: The Original Narrative Medicine Practitioner
Narrative Medicine and Physician Satisfaction. The Kirklin Clinic at UASOM,
July 19, 2005
The Necessity of Narrative in Medicine: The Story’s Reach into Human Experience, UAB Honors Program, January 4, 2007
Narrative Medicine: Stories in Patient Care (with Waid Shelton, MD),
Grand Rounds Presentation Tuscaloosa VA Hospital, April 4, 2006
Workshop in Narrative Medicine, Tuscaloosa VA Hospital.
Part 1. Reading and Discussing Doctors’ Stories, August 22, 2006
Part 2. Writing Your Own Narratives of the Physician-Patient Experience, September 26, 2006
Seminar in Narrative Medicine. Presentation Pre-medical Students, University of Alabama at Birmingham, October 8, 2005
Publications Featuring My Work in Narrative Medicine :
“Narrative Medicine: Emphasizing the Humanness of the Physician-Patient Relationship.” , UAB SYNOPSIS, Vol. 24, No. 23, June 20, 2005. Full text
“Student Rounds: Medicine and the Arts,” UAB Medicine, Vol. 31, No. 3, Winter 2006, pp 22-23: Click here to Download PDF format
“Life Stories: Another Kind of Page Calls Future Doctors.” UAB Magazine, Summer 2007. Full text
“Journal Club: Narrative Medicine Writes a New Chapter in the Physician-Patient Relationship.” UAB Medicine, Summer 2007. Download in PDF format (Article p.21)