‘Writing the Pain’: Engaging First-Person Phenomenological Accounts

Abstract

One way to teach or communicate embodied-relational existential understanding is to encourage the writing and reading of first person autobiographical phenomenological accounts. After briefly reviewing the field of first person phenomenological accounts, I offer my own example – one that uses a narrative-poetic form. I share my lived experience of coping with pain and hope to show how rich poetic phenomenological prose may facilitate lived understandings in others (be they our students, clients or colleagues). I argue that first person accounts can powerfully evoke lived experience, especially where they focus on existential issues, use personal-reflexive and/or relational-dialogal forms, and draw on the arts.