For me, it is just another day at the office, but for my patients it is a journey away from their everyday world. A visit to the doctor fits this motif nicely. 1 It is the story of the self’s journey to another level of existence, an encounter with the “universal father” (a character representing the forces of life and death), and a return to reality with the “ultimate boon” (the power to transform the world). His book The Hero with a Thousand Faces explores the archetypal myth that appears in traditional stories from around the world and also reappears in modern fiction. Joseph Campbell, the famous American mythologist, is known for his view that all of the stories people tell themselves, as well as all of the myths they retell, follow a few basic themes, and that those themes correspond to the main psychological issues that we all face. But of course our patients tell their own stories, and we cannot understand the physician-patient interaction without understanding their narratives of our encounters. As healers, we tell our stories in ways that make sense to us. Storytelling is fundamental to how people think about and understand their lives, and the use of stories in family medicine is no exception.
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