ABSTRACT
This is a story about the clinical internship year I spent ten years ago in a community medical clinic working as a therapist-in-training with chronically mentally ill and economically impoverished adults. I came to this internship after teaching in the university for years as a creative writing and literature professor, and thus, I was accustomed to writing and interpreting stories. However, becoming oriented to a new clinical career within the disorienting national context of increasingly managed care and alarming federal cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, I found it impossible to draw conclusions or find definitive explanations about the often confusing and contradictory dynamics I witnessed within and surrounding the clinic during those ten months. Instead, I took the stance that year with which, in fact, I was most comfortable: that of speculation. Thus, this is a story that resists conclusions and explanation. It is a story without convention: without protagonist, identifiable conflict, rising action, climax, or resolution. It is a story, primarily, about seeing and it is a story that attempts to see. Neither chronological, nor teleological, this story is, instead, phenomenological and speculative. In the words of philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960/1998), this story is a “coming to an understanding” (p. 469).
