If you haven’t heard this article by Shankar Vedantam (known for The Hidden Brain), do yourself a favor. The story explores why a career in nursing doesn’t attract more men. The research is fascinating, but what struck me was the message in the final few seconds:
Stereotypes are powerful because the stories we tell about ourselves are powerful. They shape how we see the world and how the world sees us. But in the end, they’re only stories. And stories – we can rewrite them.
Why More Men Don’t Get Into The Field Of Nursing
This is the core principle of “narrative therapy,” which has been around by other names for a very long time. The power of narrative to shape our understanding of ourselves and others is what attracted me to psychoanalysis in my twenties. If you’d like an example, read almost of any of Freud’s cases (preferably in Freud’s German), and you’ll see that one of the reasons for Freud’s influence is his ability to tell compelling stories.
This particular piece on nursing suggests that the way to combat stereotypes about nursing as a “women’s field” is to put up an alternate stereotype. In other words, just explaining why nursing might be appealing to men isn’t sufficient; a compelling story about men who are nurses is needed to provide access to a sense of identity.
The moral of this story: On the positive side, stories are compelling, but the negative side is . . . stories are compelling. And this brings me back to my training and practice in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Narrative has the power to constitute at least some the realities of identity, but whichever fire you choose, the danger is burning down the tower of reason. And so it was that my supervisors reinforced the importance of reality-testing in the revisionist narrative of psychotherapy.
But reality-testing the narratives that establish and sustain identity is really the hard part, not least because our access to the real is mediated by narrative.
That’s a lot to expect from “only stories.”
