While my Sister went to the Disco, I went to Hospital and Met the Doctors: Narrative as a Measure of the Psychological Integration of the Experience of Cancer in Childhood and Adolescence

More than two-thirds of children and young people with cancer today can be cured. The illness and its treatment, which often lasts for months, create physical burdens, and, in addition, make heavy psychological and social demands on the children and their relatives. The associated experiences are part of their personal life history and must be integrated into the further psychological development in some way. In order to test the hypothesis that the ability to design personal narrative around these experiences assists in overcoming them, 60 adult former patients who had suffered cancer during their childhood, and 33 of their siblings, were asked how they had experienced the illness and treatment. In this article the terms Integration and Narrative will first be defined and an attempt made to conceptualize the psychic integration of the illness experience. Using excerpts from the narratives of two pairs of siblings, it will be shown how individually the experiences of illness are integrated and the major significance of intrafamilial communication for the mode of coping with the illness and for the sibling relationship. Finally, the relevance of narrative and integration for the overcoming of illness experience and for clinical psycho-oncological work with children with cancer and their families will be critically discussed.