Tony Errichetti is a CPA graduate from Columbia's Narrative Medicine program and co-founder of the Simulationist Narrative Medicine Community for individuals working in the human patient simulation field.
Sal Marx’s wonderful graphic Pain Scale for Chronic Patients: MindBody (Intima, Fall 2021) for me illustrates the impossibility of identifying from exactly where our thoughts and words issue. We live in a body that tells stories. It can’t help it. I have a mouth and a tongue that produces words, but what activates these body parts to move and shape what is coming out of me?
This is what excites me about this piece: that diagonal yellow line separating mind and body is no more easy to separate than the artificial boundaries of MexicoTexas or RussiaUkraine. MindBody are intertwined. Stories and boundaries conflict and overlap. The project is laid out. The lived experience overlays or underlays—choose your discourse—the x-ray view deep into the body.
We can’t see deeply into the body without radiology and can’t understand what’s in the mind without our making words, images, and sounds. The body as narrative instrument. To one who loves music, a violin is not more interesting or beautiful than the sounds that we produce with it.
I came to narratives through my first career as a narrative psychotherapist in the 80s. At that time there was a lot of talk about the “brain-mind” dichotomy; that is, whether therapy should treat the brain with medication or the mind through talk. We’re still talking about it, but my sense is that the brain-fix is winning. A consolation is that the mind can change the brain.
Pain Scale deeply affects me because of how it visually represents what is in Sal Marx’s MindBody. Being a visual artist, my own work is an exercise in defining my brain-mind for myself. Writers talk about how they never know where the characters they create will go. Our creations have a life of their own. Boundaries are crossed and new paths are forged.
Bruce Chatwin’s wonderful book The Songlines comes to mind when considering how boundaries between body/brain/mind can be reimagined. He describes how the indigenous Australians, a nomadic people, sang the world into existence. Their geographical boundaries lay along the songlines created by their ancestors in the Dreamtime. The English, who came to dominate Australia, imposed their boundaries with maps and fences. In this conflict between cultures is embodied the human capacity to name things. Sal Marx, like Chatwin, seems to be reckoning with imagined boundaries as well in their work.
Tony Errichetti is a CPA graduate from Columbia's Narrative Medicine program and co-founder of the Simulationist Narrative Medicine Community for individuals working in the human patient simulation field. Errichetti is a medical educator and consultant for interpersonal communication training and assessment. IG: @thisdangerousmoment.