Anne Harrington on the Paula Gordon Show

Stories are more powerful than most of us can begin to imagine. And we may be on the verge of the long-awaited story with which we can stitch our tattered communities back together in entirely new ways -- it's a mind-body story identified by Anne Harrington, a noted historian of science at Harvard.

Stories knit our bodies to our cultures in ways that have not yet been well explored. Not only do our stories tell us how to behave in the world, Dr. Harrington says, they also tell us how to feel in the world.

We all have a narrative, she says, an implicit narrative framework that drives the kinds of decisions that we make, the kinds of moves that scientists make and patients make when they choose to go to one kind of clinician versus another.

It's as true in mind-body science as in everyday life. In both, you usually can't understand why people do what they do simply be asking them because, Dr. Harrington says -- we all breathe these stories, they're part of the atmosphere, like the weather. And we don't usually know how to articulate them. But, she says, when you can step back and see how these stories moved through time and how they then settled around us like an atmosphere we inhaled, it all becomes easier to understand.

In studying the history of mind-body science, Dr. Harrington has built on work of people who study stories, scholars who isolate rules that govern good and bad stories. She's gone back to the early 19th century to understand the stories that have shaped science -- especially medical science -- each of which draws on certain templates, narrative rules which themselves come from somewhere and also have a history.

Dr. Harrington has grouped the narratives she's discovered into six stories. The first three reflect the 19th century preoccupation with the unconscious, she reports -- The Power of Suggestion, The Body that Speaks, and The Power of Positive Thinking. The second three, she notes, are products of post-World War Two era: Broken by Modern Life, Healing Ties and Eastward Journeys.

These and all stories are shaped by the questions we ask and our questions come out of our own preoccupations. We could have been asking different questions, she reminds us. In the 20th century, we began with "What is mind?" and "What are we fundamentally?" she says. After World War Two, we were focused on "What's wrong with us?" Now, she says, we've moved toward a third question -- "How can we make ourselves well again?"

Mind-body science today blends Western sciences fascination with meditation with His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s deep interest with science which he searches for a universal basis for ethics and compassion.

What about tomorrow? Dr. Harrington sees the emergence of a sort of destabilizing conversation about community taking place -- it's not just the number of friends you have that improves your health and lengthens your life. It's also your place in the social hierarchy that determines your well-being. Dr. Harrington's not sure this glimmer of a new story is yet integrated enough to have full standing as a mind-body story, but she does believe, it has a political energy. Stay tuned.

[This Program was recorded March 28, 2006, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.]