Life history can be considered as a collaboration produced by an interviewer/listener and an interviewee/teller. We examine it through the communications theory proposed by G. Bateson. According to this theory, life history contains two levels : the relation-level and the content-level. The former means a relationship between interviewer and interviewee, when both are communicative actors in the interactional situation of the life history interview. The latter concerns the stories narrated by interviewee.
The life history described in this paper demonstrates a correspondence at these two levels. First, we focus on the verbal interactions between these two communicative actors, especially looking at them from the interviewer's viewpoint. And then we analyze the content of the narrative told by interviewee. This analysis presents that the interviewer can affect the content of the narrative in the process of producing intimacy ; that is, as the interviewer uses words of agreement or encouragement, and the intimacy between the two becomes higher on the relation-level, we can find changes occuring at the content-level in different versions of the same life history. This indicates that the relation-level is relevant to the content-level.
The stigma assigns such negative images that they might break social norms or they can't live social life with other people. As a result, they are apt to be excluded from the society. Although the problem of mental patients have been studied such various fields as in psychiatry, psychology and social welfare, the main themes of these sutdies are on the cause of their illness and on the medical rehabilitation for them. Mental patients have been mainly treated as the objects of medical treatment. So, in this paper, I focus on how mental patients living in hard situation really feel as the subujects, and what process they are experiencing to overcome their situation.
This focus has been overlooked until now. I will analyze the following points. (1) What do the mental patients feel, assigned the stigma of “losing their sociality” by their illness? (2) How do the mental patients experience the vicious circle process named by R.K. Merton “self fulfiling prophesy”, which means here that the stigma of losing sociality makes it more difficult for them to have any social relationship with other people? (3) How do they try to emancipate from the stigma of “losing sociality” and how can they regain their sociality ?
I found two mental patients associations wich are led not by any medical professional or patient's family, but are organized and managed by the patients themselves. These associations publish their bulletins, of which articles written by patients themselves are used here in my study, because I wish to grasp their true and natural feelings.
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