Storytelling agents: why narrative rather than mental time travel is fundamental

I propose that we can explain the contribution of mental time travel to agency through understanding it as a specific instance of our more general capacity for narrative understanding. Narrative understanding involves the experience of a pre-reflective and embodied sense of self, which co-emerges with our emotional involvement with a sequence of events (Velleman 2003). Narrative understanding of a sequence of events also requires a ‘recombinable system’, that is, the ability to combine parts to make myriad sequences. Mental time travel shares these two characteristics: it involves an embodied sense of self and the ability to create novel scenarios. What is unique about mental time travel is that it is a story explicitly about our selves, and it involves metarepresentation. Agency is enabled by narrative understanding when we are able to put our current situation into a larger narrative context, whereby some possible actions, but not others, make sense. However, new features of agency are enabled when we understand stories that are explicitly about our selves: we gain the ability to plan and act on plans.     

Storying Unstoried Experience in Therapeutic Practice

Sometimes life events resist storying. Although their conversion into narrative form is often recommended as a therapeutic strategy, particularly in the case of trauma, this can be a difficult and complex process. Sometimes emerging stories are associated more with therapist than client knowledges, and therefore may not be experientially resonant, and some clients’ narrative habits may predispose to problem-saturated stories and negative identity conclusions. This article uses a case study to explore the notion of unstoried experience, and the ways in which it can inhibit a sense of personal agency. I propose a constitutive witnessing practice, conceived as a constructive and generative rather than objective-observational practice, as a vehicle for the cultivation of ethically infused, but client-led storying activity.     

Sense of agency in narrative processes of repeatedly convicted drunk drivers

The study examines sense of agency as this appears in the narratives of two repeatedly convicted drunk drivers during the five-hour counselling sessions. The cases were chosen from a total of 30 cases, as representing the opposite polar types of action stories. Analysis of narrative processes showed the narrators' drunk driving (DD) as opposite solutions relating to conflicts concerning their sense of agency; for the NON-AGENTIVE CLIENT (NAC) DD as a compulsive action solution represented an abandonment of her agentive position, while for the STRONGLY-AGENTIVE CLIENT (SAC) consciously chosen DD represented an attempt to assert his personal autonomy. DD provided only a momentary sense of relief from the position of agency for the NAC, and only a momentary sense of autonomy for the SAC. The clients processed differently these agentive positions. The narration of the NAC was a stable process of alternativeness throughout the counselling sessions and repeated sense of absent agency. The narration of the SAC began as controlled process that strove to avoid the issue of DD, but during the sessions it changed, as the narrator switched from regarding himself as the counsellor's opponent, to regarding himself as a participant and responsible agent.     

Narrative, identity and mental health: How men with serious mental illness re-story their lives through sport and exercise

ObjectivesIt has been suggested that mental illness threatens identity and sense of self when one's personal story is displaced by dominant illness narratives focussing on deficit and dysfunction. One role of therapy, therefore, is to allow individuals to re-story their life in a more positive way which facilitates the reconstruction of a meaningful identity and sense of self. This research explores the ways in which involvement in sport and exercise may play a part in this process.DesignQualitative analysis of narrative.MethodWe used an interpretive approach which included semi-structured interviews and participant observation with 11 men with serious mental illness to gather stories of participants’ sport and exercise experiences. We conducted an analysis of narrative to explore the more general narrative types which were evident in participants’ accounts.FindingsWe identified three narrative types underlying participants’ talk about sport and exercise: (a) an action narrative about “going places and doing stuff”; (b) an achievement narrative about accomplishment through effort, skill or courage; (c) a relationship narrative of shared experiences to talk about combined with opportunities to talk about those experiences. We note that these narrative types differ significantly from—and may be considered alternatives to—dominant illness narratives.ConclusionThis study provides an alternative perspective on how sport and exercise can help men with serious mental illness by providing the narrative resources which enabled participants to re-story aspects of their lives through creating and sharing personal stories through which they rebuilt or maintained a positive sense of self and identity.     

The Role of Defense in the Life Story

In modern societies, adults typically provide their lives with some sense of unity and purpose by constructing self-defining life stories that serve as their identities. Such stories are told to others and to an internalized audience or listener who serves as an ultimate judge and interpreter of the narrative. Defense mechanisms specify narrative strategies that persons use to shape how their lives are told to others and to their internalized audiences. Life events and experiences are incorporated into a life story to the extent that the internalized audience can make sense of the telling. Defenses function to make some stories more tellable than they might otherwise be and to keep other potentially storied accounts from ever reaching the status of being told.     

Continuity and change in the life story: a longitudinal study of autobiographical memories in emerging adulthood

If a person's internalized and evolving life story (narrative identity) is to be considered an integral feature of personality itself, then aspects of that story should manifest some continuity over time while also providing evidence regarding important personality change. Accordingly, college freshmen and seniors provided detailed written accounts of 10 key scenes in their life stories, and they repeated the same procedure 3 months and then 3 years later. The accounts were content analyzed for reliable narrative indices employed in previous studies of life stories: emotional tone, motivational themes (agency, communion, personal growth), and narrative complexity. The results showed substantial continuity over time for narrative complexity and positive (vs. negative) emotional tone and moderate but still significant continuity for themes of agency and growth. In addition, emerging adults (1) constructed more emotionally positive stories and showed (2) greater levels of emotional nuance and self-differentiation and (3) greater understanding of their own personal development in the 4th year of the study compared to the 1st year. The study is the first to demonstrate both temporal continuity and developmental change in narrative identity over time in a broad sampling of personally meaningful life-story scenes.     

叙事传输的说服机制

叙事传输是人们沉浸在故事情景中的独特心理过程,也是故事信息特有的说服机制.叙事传输会使决策者产生与现实世界脱离的感觉,体验到强烈的情绪,然后对故事产生认同,改变态度.本文在界定叙事加工、叙事传输等理论概念基础上,重点比较叙事传输与分析加工的差异,认为两者在信息内容组织、作用途径、判断逻辑、认知努力及问题距离上都有区别.进一步研究叙事传输与分析加工、自我控制、情景决策等理论领域的关系具有重要价值.     

Living into the story: agency and coherence in a longitudinal study of narrative identity development and mental health over the course of psychotherapy

Narrative identity is the internalized, evolving story of the self that each person crafts to provide his or her life with a sense of purpose and unity. A proliferation of empirical research studies focused on narrative identity have explored its relationship with psychological well-being. The present study is the first prospective, multiwave longitudinal investigation to examine short-term personality change via an emphasis on narrative identity as it relates to mental health. Forty-seven adults wrote rich personal narratives prior to beginning psychotherapy and after every session over 12 assessment points while concurrently completing a measure of mental health. Narratives were coded for the themes of agency and coherence, which capture the dual aims of narrative identity: purpose and unity. By applying in-depth thematic coding to the stories of participants, the present study produced 47 case studies of intraindividual personality development and mental health. By employing multilevel modeling with the entire set of nearly 600 narratives, the present study also identified robust trends of individual differences in narrative changes as they related to improvements in mental health. Results indicated that, across participants, the theme of agency, but not coherence, increased over the course of time. In addition, increases in agency were related to improvements in participants' mental health. Finally, lagged growth curve models revealed that changes in the theme of agency occurred prior to the associated improvements in mental health. This finding remained consistent across a variety of individual-difference variables including demographics, personality traits, and ego development.     

The stranded cinderella and the wandering rascal. Two narratives of female housing exclusion

This article examines the life stories of two young Polish women who have faced severe marginalization and homelessness. The main aim of this article is to investigate how the notions of (in)visibility and (im)mobility are shaping participants' everyday lives and life stories they tell. Using concepts drawn from social sciences, as well as cultural and literary studies, this article attempts to reconstruct the narrative frameworks of their life stories. Marzena's story is a non-linear collection of adventures reminiscent of a picaresque novel, but with fractured agency, which leaves her powerless and restlessly moving around the city. Angelika, on the other hand, is trapped in a two-room dilapidated house with no running water, located in a rural part of Poland. Her narrative resembles a telenovela with melodramatic plot twists, romance and hard-to-believe revelations about the narrator's true self; further, it is a purposeful journey in search for happiness and fortune. Surprisingly, Marzena's mobility makes it unlikely for her to overcome homelessness, while the stranded Angelika finds the resilience necessary to improve her life. The proposed analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of women's experiences of homelessness and demonstrates the need to regard housing exclusion also as a biographical process.     

NARRATIVE AND MEANING IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Differences of understanding in science and in religion can be explored via the distinction between paradigmatic and narrative modes of explanation. Although science is inclusive of the paradigmatic, I propose that in explaining the behavior of complex adaptive systems, and in the human sciences in particular, narratives may well constitute the best scientific explanations. Causal relationships may be embedded within, and expressions of higher-order constraints provided by, complex system dynamics, best understood via the temporal organization of intentionalities that constitute narrative. Complex adaptive systems, out of which intentions emerge, have behavioral trajectories that are in principle unique, contingent, and nondeterministic even in stable states and unpredictable across phase transitions. Given such unpredictability, the only explanation can be an interpretive story that retrospectively retraces the actual changes in dynamics. Without narrative, personality traits and human actions are incomprehensible. Such phenomena do not permit a reduction of purposive acts to nonpurposive elements or of reasons to the causes they constrain. Causality does not exhaust meaning. Given the role of narratives in human lives, religion and mythology provide larger stories within which individual stories make sense. Differences between narrative and historical truth suggest how we can be constituted by what we imagine ourselves to be.     

Girls’ Stories About Their First Sexual Intercourse: Readiness,Affection and Experience-Seeking in the Process of Growing into Womanhood

This study introduces Finnish girls’ views on and explanations for the factors contributing to their decisions concerning their first sexual intercourse. The data consists of personal interviews with girls aged 16–19, and stories produced through process drama. The analysis was conducted by narrative methods. Two model story categories of the first sexual intercourse stories were constructed: the close relationship and the casual relationship. The close relationship category consists of elements of two sub-stories: the conventional and the planned love story. The casual relationship category consists of elements of the tragic love, the teenage party and the experience-seeking sub-stories. Being prepared for sex was a shared plot element in all of the first intercourse stories. In the close relationship category the other major explanatory factors were mutual love and a steady relationship. In the casual relationship category the explanatory factors were girl’s affection for the partner without a relationship or getting experience, respectively. The girls’ agency in the use of contraception and the intercourse itself differed between the sub-stories. Girls regarded intercourse as an important step towards their womanhood. Those who work with teenagers should be aware of these stories in order to reinforce those stories where teenagers are active agents.     

The use of early recollections as a narrative aid in psychotherapy

A narrative framework is put forward for using early recollections as a narrative aid in psychotherapy. According to this framework, early recollections are beginning episodes in the current version of an autobiography or self-narrative which is continuously updated to make sense of current concerns. Inclusion of these episodes in psychotherapy can provide therapists who share an interest in narrative and their clients with a quick way to recognize central themes that are restricting clients’ lives and detect openings to revise them. Revisions regard the form and content of early recollections. Three case examples propose ways of incorporating early recollections in empathic dialogs, including the process of detecting restricting themes and encouraging persons to tell stories in more compassionate voices. Group therapy is proposed as one of the contexts where early recollections can be discussed, but readers are encouraged to extend these ideas to work with individuals and families.     

Transference perspectives of story telling

Every story teller tells his stories to an imagined reader who is his transference imago. The evident validity of this proposition in the psychoanalytic process is paralleled in the literary process. Disjunctures between process or form and content and the uses of active and passive voices in the grammatical sense reveal the workings of transference in the writer's attempts, through his narrative voice, to influence the imagined reader or imago. Clinical and literary examples are employed to demonstrate these issues.     

Concevoir et construire sa vie : un modèle général pour l’accompagnement en orientation au xxie siècle

The many constructivist and narrative methods for career intervention that have been developed in the last two decades share an implicit pattern of counseling. This pattern or paradigm can be made explicit by abstracting its key elements from each of the specific methods that express the new conceptual model. The paradigm for life design interventions constructs career through small stories, reconstructs the stories into a life portrait, and co-constructs intentions that advance the career story into a new episode.     

The distinguishing characteristics of narrative identity in adults with features of borderline personality disorder: an empirical investigation

While identity disturbance has long been considered one of the defining features of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), the present study marks only the third empirical investigation to assess it and the first to do so from the perspective of research on narrative identity. Drawing on the rich tradition of studying narrative identity, the present study examined identity disturbance in a group of 40 mid-life adults, 20 with features of BPD and a matched sample of 20 without BPD. Extensive life story interviews were analyzed for a variety of narrative elements and the themes of agency, communion fulfillment (but not communion), and narrative coherence significantly distinguished the stories of those people with features of BPD from those without the disorder. In addition, associations between the theme of agency and psychopathology were evident six and twelve months following the life story interview. This study seeks to bridge the mutually-informative fields of research on personality disorders and normal identity processes.     

A narratological methodology for identifying archetypal story patterns in autobiographical narratives

Based on Jung's definition of archetype the concept 'archetypal story pattern' is developed as well as a research method drawing on narrative analysis and biographical research to identify these archetypal story patterns in life stories. Jung pointed out that personal myths, archetypal patterns found, e.g., in mythology, can govern the life course of individuals unconsciously. In the Theory of Narrative Identity comparable concepts have been mentioned but were never fully developed. In my research I try to combine Jung's concept of the archetype with the elaborated methodology of narrative analysis. Archetypes can manifest as narratives and the identity construction of a person via narrating the life story can be influenced or even totally structured by archetypal stories which give a specific form as well as a specific meaning to the person's identity. The method of extracting an underlying archetypal pattern from an autobiographical narrative is demonstrated. The results of the research on 20 autobiographical interviews and the inherent archetypal patterns are summarized. The major aim of this paper is to describe in detail the application of a well established method of the social sciences on a key concept of Jungian psychology to show that these concepts can be integrated into recent research frameworks of academic sciences. On the other hand it shows that Jungian concepts can be investigated through established and well defined research methods in empirical research settings.     

Beyond Verbal Narratives: Using Timeline Images in the Semiotic Cultural Study of Meaning Making

Contemporary semiotic cultural tradition in psychology views human meaning making as unfolding through the negotiation of multiple real and imagined scenarios and storylines. While emphasising this complex and layered nature of meaning making, this research tradition offers little methodological guidance for appreciating and evidencing this multiplicity in data analysis and interpretation. This paper suggests that a methodological approach that combines visual and verbal ways of representing one’s personal stories might offer a useful alternative for evidencing the multiple meanings that individuals create about their personal journeys. By presenting two examples of drawn timeline images and corresponding interview extracts, the paper discusses how the chosen methodological approach offered opportunities for participants to ‘show and tell’ their complex and layered stories, and gave them freedom and agency to shape the research encounter and data production processes. The paper also highlights how the incorporation of visual methods into the methodology enabled the researcher to find alternative ways of interpreting participants’ stories. The paper argues for a purposeful integration of visual and verbal methods, where the semiotic tensions and clashes between these modes can reveal novel ways of seeing researchers’ and participants’ meanings in the making.     

Co-Authoring “We-ness” and Stories of Intimacy

Drawing from narrative ideas and practices, we consider how individuals, couples, and couples with therapists co-author and co-edit stories of “we-ness,” a kind of relational consciousness, and intimacy in the context of research interviews. Adapting the “small story” narrative approach of Michael Bamberg, and recognizing researcher reflexivity, we present details from two separate studies into: (1) how cohabitating couples co-authored stories of “we-ness” in and beyond a research interview; and (2) how young married couples co-authored stories of “we-ness” by describing how they made significant decisions together through difficult yet successful conversations. Inviting such stories of “we-ness” can talk this intimacy into being. We relate the processes and outcomes of these studies to using a narrative approach to help individuals and couples with concerns about intimacy within the context of therapy.     

Psychotherapy and schizophrenia: An analysis of requirements of an individual psychotherapy for persons with profoundly disorganized selves

Many emerging views of outcome from schizophrenia emphasize that persons must recover a sense of their own identity, agency, and personal worth. While this is intuitively appealing and consistent with a wide range of literature, it raises the issue of how best to facilitate this. In this article we explore how integrative psychotherapy might address issues of narrative and recovery from schizophrenia among persons experiencing more profound levels of disorganization. Illustrated with a case example we explore in particular the barriers posed to psychotherapy by a client's cacophonous self-presentations. We then describe techniques from an integrative perspective that might help therapists enter dialogue with persons so afflicted. Our claim is that psychotherapy can revitalize dialogues within the client and between the client and others that enable the reconstruction of a personal narrative from which a life plan might be articulated.