Therapy of intergenerational narration in Roksana Jędrzejewska-Wróbel's Stan splątania (State of Entanglement). Relationship study

Abstract

Roksana Jędrzejewska-Wróbel's novel presents the social world in a state of violation of generational relations. The titular “state of entanglement” is not (only) pathographically marked here, but turns into social entanglement (as in Bruno Latour's concept). The inner world of the characters: three teenagers against the background of a school peer group, three seniors against the background of other residents of a nursing home for the elderly, parents and teachers of the first group – is internally complicated, and generational relationships force the need for therapeutic thinking. The communication space, which generates metaphors of closure (such as 'box', 'storage room', 'cage'), is the institution of the school and its territory, a closed center for seniors, a guarded housing estate. The forest becomes a metaphor for free existence and habituation (as in the concepts of Henry David Thoreau). The intergenerational narrative therapy practiced by Roksana Jędrzejewska-Wróbel counteracts the risk of excessive individuation of experience, its singularity and separateness, and the loss of the performative and emancipatory function of the text. The writer includes other therapeutic discourses: affective, maladic, mournful. He performs the social inclusion of peripheral groups, talking about the conditions for creating communities, bearing in mind the essential functions of creating a narrative about experience – here: isolation, indifference, loneliness, apathy, opportunism – cognitive, educational, therapeutic.