Cancer as an interruption in the plot: the contribution of the psychology in patients’ reframing their own narratives

The human being results from a co-constructed narration, which happens within background meanings and cultural frameworks, and in turn provide meanings to assign to each human experience. These meanings precede individual lives, they are their implicit premises, and in that way, they allow us to find significant answers to our experiences and to build a plot to our own story—placing each experience in a precise place that fits within our past and future history. When the experience is extra-ordinary like having a cancer, the need for a meaning is stronger and more difficult: this difficulty is expressed by the psychological suffering. When patients appeal to a psychologist/psychotherapist, they are impelled by the suffering induced in the perception of a break in their narrative and the psychotherapeutic work is a work on the narratives, aimed to help patients in re-writing their own stories from different perspectives. This re-writing will be completely adaptive only when able to produce new frameworks of meaning through the change of implicit premises.