When the body is defective: An object relations informed narrative analysis of the illness experience of people affected by pulmonary hypertension

Journal title RICERCHE DI PSICOLOGIA
Author/s Andrea Caputo
Publishing Year 2020 Issue 2020/3
Language English Pages 18 P. 817-834 File size 241 KB
DOI 10.3280/RIP2020-003002
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Pulmonary Hypertension (PH) can be considered as a paradigmat-ic disease for the understanding of repairing processes enacted to re-store internal regulation when the body is defective. The present study aims at providing an object relations informed narrative analy-sis of the illness experience of people affected by PH through a qualitative phenomenological analysis of the illness narratives of 12 adult Italian patients with PH. Four thematic areas (each consisting of three subthemes) were identified that respectively deal with pro-gressive stages of illness story: coping with early symptoms (mean-inglessness, minimization, self-blame), searching for a diagnosis (helplessness, burden, refusal of medical advice), reacting to diagno-sis (shock, resignation, acceptance of limitations) and facing the fu-ture (medical benefits, faith in God, support from patients’ associa-tions). Findings make a significant contribution to the exploration of people with PH’s several subjective challenges in coping with a de-fective body from symptom onset to after diagnosis.

Keywords: Pulmonary hypertension, illness perception, narratives, qualitative phenomenological analysis, object relations theory.

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Andrea Caputo, When the body is defective: An object relations informed narrative analysis of the illness experience of people affected by pulmonary hypertension in "RICERCHE DI PSICOLOGIA " 3/2020, pp 817-834, DOI: 10.3280/RIP2020-003002