PART V: THE NARRATIVE FUTURE OF ETHICS PRACTICE: CHAPTER 21: THE STORY INSIDE.

This article explores the impact of narrative on oneself. Narrative inevitably expresses and transforms who we are at every level of our being: the organic, the symbolic, the social, and the spiritual. The narrative urge is central, although occasionally perilous, even in that complicated form of self and other enacted in bioethics practice. At the organic level, for instance, our bodies give birth to certain narrative ways of perceiving the world. After decades of believing that nothing can replace brain cells, once destroyed, scientists are using the new, sophisticated imaging techniques (nuclear magnetic resonance [NMR] scans and positron emission tomography [PET] scans) to reveal the exciting news that experience causes our brains to be reorganized. A growing group of scientists believes that behavior not only changes our personhood as understood broadly--this has long been axiomatic--but, more specifically, that behavior is the principal determinant of alterations in our nervous system. The stories heard and read by bioethicists are generally complicated symbolic structures. In my experience, it has proved helpful for caregivers intent on decoding such structures to learn that clinical stories can often be classified according to literary nomenclature for narrative and dramatic types.