Life stories and shared experience

Illness narratives have become a central issue in medical anthropology. Many researchers have made use of narratives as data in a meaning-centered approach, analysing personal illness accounts as a kind of coping strategy by which human beings ascribe cultural meaning to suffering. Often such narratives are being presented as clinical case stories or as patients' accounts told in interviews to a researcher. But apart from being methodologically created data personal stories also have their own life. They are a way of expressing experience, and as reality manifests itself as experience in us, stories are fundamental to human understanding. In many therapeutic groups personal stories are told as a way of sharing experience in order to solve common problems. This article focuses on the social and processual nature of personal narratives as they are presented in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) groups. The article is based on a study of AA and Minnesota Model treatment of alcoholism in Denmark from 1990 to 1993. Various genres of personal narratives told at AA meetings are identified and analysed referring to individual as well as social and cultural levels. By focusing on interpersonal relationships and the creation of a shared identity in the groups, the article suggests that the ongoing telling of personal narratives in Alcoholics Anonymous takes place in a continuum between autobiography and myth. Thus, individual and collective experience are merged into the same therapeutic process.