EMPLOTMENT И ТЕРАПЕВТИЧЕСКОЕ ВЗАИМОДЕЙСТВИЕ: ФЕНОМЕНОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ МОТИВЫ В МЕДИЦИНСКОЙ АНТРОПОЛОГИИ ЧЕРИЛ МАТТИНГЛИ
EMPLOTMENT AND THERAPEUTIC INTERACTION: PHENOMENOLOGICAL MOTIVES IN MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF CHERYL MATTINGLY

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on the phenomenological aspects of Cheryl Mattingly’s empirical research.Cheryl Mattingly is one of the brightest representatives of modern American medical anthropology.Medical anthropology — actively developing social science — often, especially since the end of the80-ies of the last century, refers to the conceptual resources of phenomenological philosophy tojustify their methodological and value priorities. Such reference is connected with the attentionof medical anthropologists to the subjective experience of illness and health, to the meaning ofsuffering, to patients’ storytelling, to situational effects of clinical interactions, to the changes inthe life-world of man caused by serious chronic diseases. The first part of the article explicates thetheoretical framework of the version of the applied phenomenology, which is offered by Mattinglyin her long-term research conducted in 1990s and 2000 years. The subject of these research workswas clinical interactions between occupational therapists and their patients. The analysis of theseinteractions is based on Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenologically grounded thesis that between thenarrative and the experience of time there is an isomorphism thanks to the binding force of the plot.Mattingly brings the concept of narrative and a series of accompanying characteristics from thesphere of philosophical narratology to the sphere of phenomenology of (inter)action. The main ideaof Mattingly is that the action itself has a narrative structure, — in the sense that actors themselvesperform emplotment of interaction, configure the current events in a way that they are built intoa whole, namely therapeutic history in which each successive episode of therapy follows from theprevious one. The second part of the article illustrates on example of real therapy session how theseideas work in practice, in the process of the interpretation of particular therapeutic interactions. Ingeneral, we are planning to show that, although Mattingly’s appeal to phenomenological contextis not systematic, and it is more correct to speak of the phenomenological “motives” in her work, it142 VITALY LEKHTSIERcan be treated as one of the most interesting applications of phenomenological philosophy in thefield of social sciences.

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