On Pathographies: The Healing Power of Scriptotherapy in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

Abstract

As unprocessed trauma remains stored in the individual‟s mind and body, this thesis aims to demonstrate how memoirs are texts at the border between pathography and scriptotherapy. It undesrcores how they create a space where the writer can not only express his traumatic experience and grieving process, but also embark on a therapeutic journey. More precisely, it studies the healing journey of the American memoirist Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking (2005). In light of the theoretical underpinnings of Suzette A. Henke's set of concepts put forward in Shattered Subjects (1998), it highlights scriptotherapy as a survival mechanism. Additionally, to explore Didion's trauma and grief process, this study draws on Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience, Trauma Narrative and History (1969). And Elisabeth Kubler Ross's Five Stages of Grief Theory (1969). This research delineates scriptotherapy as a space wherein writers explore their traumatic experiences and embark on the therapeutic journey also accentuates the significance of writing used in Didion's memoir.It delves deeply into the origins of trauma and grief theories along with scriptotherapy and how they're related to literature, depicts Didion's healing struggles as represented by the strategy she devises and dubs "Magical Thinking", and scriptotherapy as a survival mechanism by describing how Didion projected her own trauma and grief experiences into journaling. The study concludes that healing from traumatic experiences such as loss is cured through scriptotherapy, which is the survival mechanism in Didion's memoir.