Erlebte Genesungsgeschichten: Eine qualitative Studie über Spontanremissionen bei Krebserkrankungen

Recovery Stories: A qualitative study on spontaneous remission of cancer This paper aims at constructing a heuristic typology of stories, in which patients talk about their point of view of how and why they recovered from cancer. The study’s subjects were 12 patients whose cancer had remitted spontaneously. Narrative interviews were conducted and analyzed using mainly the method of Narrative Type Formation. The aim of the analysis was to find similarities in basic assumptions of the patients. As a result of our teamevaluation which was aimed at forming a consensus among team members, we generated three heuristic “types” of recovery stories: “Stories of defense battles”, “Stories of divine grace”, and “Stories of self-transformation”. The findings suggest that these three narrative types may be interpreted as types of actualized aspects of patients’ self-concepts.