Self-Reconstruction and Biographical Revisioning: Survival Following Cancer in Childhood or Adolescence

Abstract

Narratives of long-term survival reveal a social process involving complex negotiation of identity issues, future planning and future health concerns which enables survivors to combine both fear and hope in order to develop ideas about an imagined future. Young men and women provided personal accounts, and central to their stories are efforts at biographical revisioning and self-reconstruction, which illustrate that long-term survival throws into question conventional temporal securities and predictable trajectories of self-development. Here, I present my notion of the ‘consciousness of survival’ and outline features of a further concept of ‘successful survival’. These terms relate to an ontological process in which the survivor can use illness, survival, living in a remission society and late effects of treatment as a medium for the creation of new relationships to self and others, and to learn about the world we create and inhabit. Gender and cultural background affect enactment of this process.