Therapeutic use of interactive narratives with mothers in situation of social precariousness

Abstract

Considering that the insufficiency or absence of social support has taken pregnant women and mothers to request psychological help during the process in which they become mothers, we ask ourselves about the possibility of extending the same benefits to mothers that usually don’t have access to psychotherapy. The present study aims to investigate the mutative potential of the maternal suffering approach by means of interactive narratives, fictional short stories about motherhood, as an invitation to explore the fields of affective-emotional meaning, which arise from a maternal conflict. Having as a starting point the psychoanalytical encounters with fourteen mothers, we observed that the participants have selected aspects from the narratives with which they established the personal identification, which enabled them to explore, find out and reconfigure the fields of affective-emotional meaning, an operation which would allow the change. We can conclude that the heuristic and mutative potential of the interactive narratives authorizes us to recommend its use in preventive and psychotherapeutic settings.