Stories of family, stories of self: developmental pathways to interpretive thought during adolescence

Research has shown that a hallmark of adolescent development is the growing capacity to interpret human intentionality. In this chapter, the authors examine developmental change in this capacity, which they have termed interpretive thought, in two types of stories, family and autobiographical, told by Canadian youth aged ten to seventeen years. Illustrative examples reveal that youth coordinate an increasing number of psychological components and in so doing, create increasingly abstract and coherent psychological profiles of self and others.     

Vicarious life stories: Examining relations to personal life stories and well-being

We examined relationships between vicarious life stories for mothers and distant others, personal life stories, and well-being. Participants described chapters in their mothers’ and personal life stories, self-rated chapters on emotional tone and meaning, and completed well-being measures. In Studies 3 and 4, participants described chapters for distant others. In Study 4, mothers’ personal life stories were collected. In Studies 2–4, chapters were coded for redemption, agency, and communion. Qualities of vicarious and personal life stories were positively related, except for ex-boy/girlfriends (Study 4). Vicarious life stories were less positive and were less consistently related to well-being than personal life stories. Vicarious life stories for mothers were positively related to both participants’ personal life stories and mothers’ personal life stories.     

On aggressiveness and violence in adolescence1

When considering aggressiveness and violence during adolescence, we must take into account multiple senses, which range from the healthy assertion of one's own space before others to the repetition of traumatic violent experiences such as the violation of bodily and spatial‐temporal boundaries. The author presents a survey of the views of different authors within psychoanalytical literature which allows us to question these terms, and turn then to the exploration of clinical practice. In studying the latter, acting out is brought to the fore, noting that not every adolescent act connotes a risk. The acts tackled in this case are those that, owing to their characteristics, may often endanger the very life of the adolescent. The author presents clinical material that focuses on adolescent acting out, highlighting the question of how to create, through the transference‐countertransference axis, a space within the analytic session where the patient's capacity to think may be incorporated, thus allowing the anticipation of action.     

Personal projects,life stories,and happiness: On being true to traits

In three studies (Ns between 125 and 176), happiness in life was the highest for undergraduates whose personal goals and life-story identities were supported by thematically consistent personality traits. In Study 1, happiness was highest among participants who were pursuing highly social goals that were supported by sociable traits. This relation between trait–goal consistency and happiness was partially mediated by perceptions of goal manageability. In Study 2, happiness was highest among participants who had highly social life-story identities that were supported by sociable traits. Study 3 replicated the main results of Studies 1 and 2 and also found a significant relation between the extent to which participants’ goals and life-story identities were social in theme.     

Telling stories

Patients need to tell their stories. One of our primary tasks as analysts is to help patients tell their stories and own them. The freedom of mind to think, to feel, and to know are dependent on the ongoing capacity for storytelling. The analyst's stance plays a major role in the development of the analysand's storytelling capacities.     

The Reasons to Go On Living Project: stories of recovery after a suicide attempt

Qualitative research in suicidology has become increasingly common in the literature. Lakeman and FitzGerald (2008) conducted a review of qualitative works specifically on suicide and recovery. Five interconnected themes—suffering/psychache, struggle, connection, turning points, and suicide and coping—were identified. The Reasons to Go On Living Project (RTGOL) project was a web-based narrative research project that sought to understand the transition from making a suicide attempt to choosing life. This article reports the findings of a secondary analysis of the narratives. By using Lakeman and FitzGerald’s themes as a starting point, one hundred and thirteen submissions were thematically analyzed using a deductive approach. The findings are mostly consistent with the interconnected themes identified by Lakeman and FitzGerald. Moreover, subthemes were identified to better reflect the lived experience of the participants. Clinical and research implications of this project will be discussed.     

Love stories

This article presents a view of love as a story. The basic idea is that through the interaction of our personal attributes with the environment, the latter of which we in part create, we develop stories about love that we then seek to fulfill in our lives. Various potential partners fit these stories to greater and lesser degrees, and we are more likely to be attracted to and then to become intimate with partners who better fulfill the roles we have created in our stories. Each story has two complementary roles, and people tend to be satisfied in relationships when they can match persons to ideal stories and roles within those stones. A tentative taxonomy of some kinds of stories is presented, and the characteristics of the stones are described. The view is also related to contemporary theories of love, and it is argued that the current view is complementary with these theories, in that it answers different questions about the nature of love than do the other theories.     

Ghost stories

This essay reflects on the exclusions and invisibilities that haunt academic subjectivities, spaces, and research practices. The exclusion criteria that delimit both scholars and scholarship are not natural or fair; they are the expressions of classed, raced, gendered, and ableist ideals, that privilege separation, order, and certainty. That which is marked as other – the remainder, which must not or cannot be admitted – is not fully excluded, but lurks at or below the waterline of legibility, disrupting academic bodies and departments with its persistent, often affective traces. Rather than trying to explain something that is primarily characterized by its inexplicability, the author brings readers into her department, to try to show them the ghosts that she has (not quite) seen, in order to appeal for more humane, inclusive, ghost-friendly ways of being and working in the academy.     

Summarizing scrambled stories

Subjects read stories 1,400 words long and wrote 60- to 80-word summaries of these stores. Reading time was either unrestricted or limited, and the stories were either presented in natural order or with their paragraphs scrambled. Reading times were longer for the scrambled stories, but the same kind of summaries were produced whether stories were presented in natural or scrambled order. When a well-structured story was used, judges were unable to distinguish the two types of summaries and rated the adequacy of summaries based upon the scrambled version about as high as that of summaries based upon normal stories. For a less well-structured story, judges could differentiate between the summaries from natural and scrambled stories. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the story schema which permits subjects to comprehend scrambled stories by reorganizing them.