Affect, Literature and the Medical Encounter

Abstract

Although medicine has great technical achievements to its credit, its "evidence-based" paradigm has lacked in its failure to recognize the importance of the relationship between patients and physicians in the amelioration of the illness experience. Affect theory, especially as described by Massumi, Stern, Sointu, Damasio and Frank, employs the concepts of "the virtual", embodiment, and "vitality" in examining the dynamics, and enhanced potential for healing, of the clinical consultation. Seen through the lens of affect theory, novelists and poets such as Munro, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Tolstoy, Carver, Faulkner and McCullers, amongst others, in the relationships they portray, in their lyrical interrogation of unusual experience, in their examination of the relationship between emotion and reason, and in their exploration of the difficulties of expressing embodied experience in words, create the possibility for a refocused doctor-patient encounter.