The narrative construction of the ‘wounded healer’

Hadjiosif, Miltos

Abstract

The relational turn in psychotherapy has broken down the therapist – patient divide that has dominated mental health practices, calling for a renewed examination of therapeutic practitioners’ subjectivity and motivations for entering the profession. Psychotherapists have been described as ‘wounded healers’, a term whose origins have been traced back to ancient shamanic traditions and Jungian analytical psychology. Despite a plethora of texts on the ‘wounded healer’, little systematic research within psychology has been conducted to unpack the implications and embedded assumptions of this concept. This paper takes the ‘wounded healer’ into the research arena by approaching it as an analytic tool to explore therapeutic practitioners’ personal and professional development. Six therapeutic practitioners who identified with the concept were interviewed with a view to narrate their development as ‘wounded healers’. Interviews were analysed using a tailored, multi-lens approach within a narrative epistemology. Besides attending to the narrative features of the texts, the paper discusses findings in relation to three key themes: ‘entering a community of wounded healers’; ‘formulating the wounded healer’; and ‘deconstructing the wounded healer’. Unpacking this modality-flexible yet historically loaded construct necessitates challenging the ‘wounded healer’ as fixed identity and replacing it with an ethos that can lead to training, supervisory and personal therapy recommendations promoting reflection on therapists’ relation to their ‘wounds’ and how this informs their therapeutic work.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: 6th International Qualitative Research in Mental Health Conference
• Start Date: May 27, 2016
• End Date: May 28, 2016
• Deposit Date: Jun 29, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 29, 2022
• Keywords: wounded healer; narrative analysis; personal and professional development; social constructionism; psychotherapy
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9664950
• Publisher URL: https://symvoli.com/portfolio/qrmh8-2021/