Bakhtin, nursing narratives, and dialogical consciousness

Dialogical interaction is fundamental to considerations of nursing narrative, discourse, and communication. The story the patient tells is listened to, interpreted, and responded to through appropriate nursing care. Although nurses have long recognized narrative as central to humanistic nursing practice, the theoretical considerations of dialogue have received less attention with respect to nursing knowledge development. Mikhail Bakhtin, a key philosopher of narrative in the 20th century, put forward a dialogical narrative approach that is directly related to nursing concepts of narrative, interaction, and personhood and suggestive of a postmodern clinical epistemology. This article relates Bakhtin's dialogical narrative approach to nursing practice.