VOLITIONAL NARRATIVES AND THE MEANING OF THERAPY

Objectives. Occupational therapy literature has long recognized meanin g as central to therapy. By focusing almost exclusively on how the the rapy process influences the experience of meaning, the literature has neglected to examine how the patient's experiences before therapy infl uence the creation of meaning in therapy. Method. Building on a previo us study of how patients discover and recount the meaning of their own lives in volitional narratives, we investigated the effect of those n arratives on the experience of therapy. Results and Conclusion. Our ex amination of the therapeutic experiences of two patients enrolled in a psychiatric day hospital program reveals how they assigned meaning to therapy as an episode within their larger volitional narrative.