Elinor Ochs

Lisa Capps

Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling

Living Narrative

Construcing Panic offers an unprecedented analysis of one patient's experience of agoraphobia. Authored by a team comprising a clinical psychologist and a linguist, the book proposes a new view of agoraphobia as a communicative disorder.

The Discourse of Agoraphobia

Constructing Panic

Professor of Anthropology Elinor Ochs

This pathbreaking book looks at everyday storytelling as a twofold phenomenon--a response to our desire for coherence, but also to our need to probe and acknowledge the enigmatic aspects of experience. Letting us listen in on dinner-table conversation, prayer, and gossip, Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps develop a way of understanding the seemingly contradictory nature of everyday narrative--as a genre that is not necessarily homogeneous and as an activity that is not always consistent but consistently serves our need to create selves and communities. Focusing on the ways in which narrative is co-constructed, and on the variety of moral stances embodied in conversation, the authors draw out the instructive inconsistencies of these collaborative narratives, whose contents and ordering are subject to dispute, flux, and discovery. In an eloquent last chapter, written as Capps was waging her final battle with cancer, they turn to unfinished narratives, those stories that will never have a comprehensible end. With a hybrid perspective--part humanities, part social science--their book captures these complexities and fathoms the intricate and potent narratives that live within and among us.

Meg Logan has not been farther than two miles from home in six years. She has agoraphobia, a debilitating anxiety disorder that entraps its sufferers in the fear of leaving safe havens such as home. Paradoxically, while at this safe haven, agoraphobics spend much of their time ruminating over past panic experiences and imagining similar hypothetical situations. In doing so, they create a narrative that both describes their experience and locks them into it. Constructing Panic offers an unprecedented analysis of one patient's experience of agoraphobia. In this novel interdisciplinary collaboration between a clinical psychologist and a linguist, the authors probe Meg's stories for constructions of emotions, actions, and events. They illustrate how Meg uses grammar and narrative structure to create and recreate emotional experiences that maintain her agoraphobic identity. In this work Capps and Ochs propose a startling new view of agoraphobia as a communicative disorder. Constructing Panic opens up the largely overlooked potential for linguistic and narrative analysis by revealing the roots of panic and by offering a unique framework for therapeutic intervention. Readers will find in these pages hope for managing panic through careful attention to how we tell the story of our lives.

Marian Sigman

The authors combine clinical vignettes, research findings, methodological considerations and historical accounts.

A Developmental Perspective

Children with Autism

Esta obra dirige una mirada poco usual al mundo del autismo; misterioso trastorno que afecta a un número muy importante de personas y también a quienes conviven con ellas. Sus autoras, Marian SIGMAN y Lisa CAPPS, interpretan las características que presenta el autismo en todos los niveles de funcionamiento intelectual a lo largo de la vida, y reúnen en una misma exposición: aspectos clínicos, conclusiones de numerosas investigaciones, consideraciones metodológicas, tratamientos y explicaciones históricas. El resultado es una visión comprensible y convincente de este trastorno, fiel a la experiencia humana así como a la observación científica. La singularidad de este libro radica en que observa el autismo a través de la lente de la psicopatología evolutiva, una disciplina que asume que los estudios del desarrollo normal y patológico pueden intercomunicarse y beneficiarse mutuamente. Las autoras explican todo el proceso que sigue el desarrollo del autismo, desde la infancia hasta la madurez, señalando en cada fase las diferencias entre autistas y no autistas. Asimismo, destacan las conexiones que existen entre los aspectos cognitivo, social y emocional del crecimiento. En concreto, señalan que las deficiencias en la comprensión social surgen en la primera infancia de quienes padecen este trastorno, y analizan de qué forma estas deficiencias organizan el desarrollo durante su vida. También examinan los efectos que pueden producir determinadas características a lo largo del tiempo en la adaptación de una persona autista. El libro aporta una visión general de las distintas modalidades de intervención que hoy existen y de aquellas líneas de investigación más prometedoras.

Lisa Capps

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