AND PRESENTATIONS
Publications
Griffin, F. Surviving the Way We Live: Narrative Medicine and Psychiatry, Newsletter of the North Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians, Spring 2010
Griffin, F. Clinical Use of Imaginative Literature: Creative Reading and Creative Writing, Newsletter of the Dallas Psychoanalytic Center, Fall 2009
Griffin, F. Constructing Ernest Jones (Book Review Essay: Freud’s Wizard: Ernest Jones and the Transformation of Psychoanalysis), International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Part 5:2009 Full text (PDF)
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. Teaching Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: Voices that Have Reach. Book Review Essay in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 54/4, 2006. Full text (Word)
Griffin, F. Clinical Conversations between Psychoanalysis and Imaginative Literature, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXXIV, No. 2, April 2005. Full text (PDF)
Griffin, F. One Form of Self-analysis, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXXIII, July 2004. Full text (PDF)
Griffin, F. The Fortunate Physician: Learning from Our Patients, Literature and Medicine, Volume 23, No. 2, Fall 2004. Full text (PDF)
Griffin, F. and Paulsen, R. Conversations with Physicians about the Doctor-Patient Relationship, The American Psychoanalyst, Winter 2004
Presentations
Animating the Relational World: The Clinical Use of Creative Reading and
Creative Writing. Dallas Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology
November 17, 2010
Surviving the Way We Live: Narrative Medicine and Psychiatry North Texas
Society of Psychiatric Physicians. September 23, 2010
The Therapeutic Process: Some Integrative Models from Neurobiology and
Cognitive Neuroscience Grand Rounds, Department of Psychiatry at UT
Southwestern Medical School, April 14, 2010
Founders’ Day Presentation, Dallas Psychoanalytic Center
The Clinical Use of Imaginative Literature: Creative Reading and Creative
Writing, October 24, 2009
Presentation at Examined Life: Writing and the Art of Medicine conference,
University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, Surviving the Way We Live: the Use of Creative Writing for Containment of the Physician’s Emotional Experience, May 1, 2009
Creative Writing as an Avenue to Processing Emotional Trauma. Presentation to New Orleans-Birmingham Psychoanalytic Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, October 17, 2008
One Form of Self-Analysis: The Act of Creative Writing as Psychoanalytic Process. Presentation to Atlanta Psychoanalytic Society, September 19, 2008
Senior Psychoanalyst Presentation, Annual Meeting of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, Atlanta, Georgia, June 18, 2008
Presenter at Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy discussion group at
American Psychoanalytic Association meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, June 18,
2008
Psychoanalytic Perspectives: Freud and Beyond. Honors Program, University of Alabama at Birmingham, August 28, 2008
What Neuroscience Tells Us about How and Why Psychotherapy Works, Grand Rounds in UAB Department of Psychiatry, University of Alabama School of Medicine
Part 1 October 7, 2007
Part 2 October 14, 2007
What Neuroscience Tells Us about How and Why Psychotherapy Works. Alabama Psychiatric Society, March 30, 2007, Sandestin, Florida
Love and Loss as Portrayed in a Painting by Benjamin West. Birmingham
Museum of Art, February 13, 2007
The Necessity of Narrative in Medicine: The Story’s Reach into Human Experience, Honors Program, University of Alabama School of Medicine, January 4, 2007
Imaginative Literature and the Psychoanalytic Process, New Directions in Writing program of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, Washington, DC, Creative Dialogues, October 13-15, 2006
The Use of a Short story to Resolve a Clinical Impasse: What Psychoanalysts
Can Learn from Creative Writers about the Analytic Space and the Process of Containment. Syracuse Psychoanalytic Study Group, Syracuse, New York,
June 29, 2006
The Use of a Short Story to Resolve a Clinical Impasse: What Psychoanalysts
Can Learn from Creative Writers about the Analytic Space and the Process of Containment. Presentation to the New Orleans Psychoanalytic Center, April 7, 2006
The Necessity of Art in Medicine, Address to University of Alabama School of Medicine Student and Faculty AOA Art Show, February 10, 2006.
Writing and Telling Your Stories to Improve the Art of Medicine. Workshop
sponsored by the Permanente Journal, October 20, 2005 Narrative Medicine and Physician Satisfaction William Carlos Williams: The Original Narrative Medicine Practitioner
Narrative Medicine with the Ward Team: Stories from Patient Care, Grand
Rounds, Department of Psychiatry, October 4, 2005
The Use of a Short Story to Resolve a Clinical Impasse: What Psychoanalysts
Can Learn from Creative Writers about the Analytic Space and the Process of
Containment. Grand Rounds, Department of Psychiatry, University of
Alabama School of Medicine, May 10, 2005
Clinical Conversations between Psychoanalysis and Imaginative Literature, Dallas Psychoanalytic Society, April 2, 2005
What Is Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, Anyway? Grand Rounds, Department of Psychiatry, University of Alabama School of Medine, March 8, 2005
Clinical Conversations between Psychoanalysis and Imaginative Literature,
Memphis Psychoanalytic Study Group, November, 2004
The Physician-Patient Relationship According to Dr. William Carlos Williams,
Presentation at 30th Reunion U.T. Southwestern Medical School May 2004
One Form of Self-Analysis, Presentation at Dallas Psychoanalytic Society, March 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)