Crossley, M. (2000) Introducing Narrative Psychology (Buckingham: Open University Press)

C1: Theories of Self and Identity

"the concept of self is inextricably linked to language, narratives, others, time and morality" (p.21).

Responding to C S Lewis' on "ourselves" (Mere Christianity, 1952, p.25), Crossley suggests "Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that we are 'strangers' to ourselves, our whole lives lived much as a mystery?" (p.3)

Humanistic/Psychodynamic - Maslow, Rogers, Kelly.  Commonalities with Narrative Psychology:

• Shared philosophical roots - phenomenology and existentialism;

• Focus on individual meaning, depth and uniqueness;

• Preference for quantitative approaches;

N.P. and social constructivist studies of self

Interconnection between social structure/language and self. Realist assumptions of self are seen as problematic. Instead, the self is conceptualised as inextricably dependent on linguistic practices. Questions about the self are not concerned with its "nature", but rather how the self is talked about and theorised in discourse.

Humans are meaning makers and interpreters. Qualitative approach of N.P. is more suited to incorporating the temporality (sequence-activity) of human experience and the processes connecting ourselves to other people through relationships and human culture. See especially the works of George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley.

See also

• Childhood: Importance of play in e.g. developing a sense of self-reflective awareness;

• Gender: Gender and identity (Gilligan, 1992; Gergen and Gergen, 1993);

• Morality: identity and morality  (Taylor, 1989).

The inward turn
Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

At the hub of Taylor's philosophy is the idea that people come to discover and revise their identities in dialogues with others that are interpretative in character. Almost all of Taylor's work revolves around this insight. His works claim that modern subjectivity has its roots in ideas of human good, and is the result of humanity's long efforts to define and attain the good. Taylor argues that contemporary concerns regarding the self differ from the kinds of concerns people experienced in the past, or indeed outside of 'the West', and that 'substantative' definitions of morality no longer dominate our lives. Our 'frameworks' of meaning, once 'unchallengeable', have become problematic.

Reasons for change: decline of religion; rise of the modern capitalist economy.
Peculiarity of Western conception of self: its assumed objectivity (e.g. 'the' self).
Origins of modern selfhood: Augustine - 'inwardness of radical reflexivity'.

Reflexivity

Self-control: esp. Locke, and charted by Foucault in his Discipline and Punish (1991). Self-exploration: "one of the fundamental themes of modern culture" (Crossley, p.20); importance of memory; influence of Romantics, e.g. Rousseau: this "individualistic stance, originating in the Romantic period ... remains fundamental to the reflexive self-exploratory stance characteristic of the contemporary era." (Crossley, p.20)

Plus see: Cushman, P. (1990) Why the self is empty: towards a historically situated psychology, American Psychologist 45 p.599-611 "...presents a contextualized treatment of the current configuration of self, some of the pathologies that plague it, and the technologies that attempt to heal it" (Cushman, 1990, p.599).

Also:
"...power and control are intrinsic to this process of the narrative construction of self..." (p.21)

C2: Discursive methods and the study of self

Postmodern approaches
Postmodern era - rise of post-structural approaches, representatives of which include:

• Michel Foucault (1926-1984);

• Jacques Derrida (1930-2004);

• Jean Francois Lyotard (1924-1998);

• Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)

How does poststructuralism differs from its predecessor, structuralism? Broadly speaking, there are two categories of differentiation:

1. Historicizations of the subject, e.g. Michel Foucault;

2. Challenging linguistic essentialism, e.g. Jacques Derrida.

The later work of Foucault's and also the writings of Pierre Bourdieu analyse the relationship between the micro and macro levels of society in terms of power.

See also: Semiotics

Postmodern psychology relevant to N.P.: Kenneth Gergen, "who characterizes postmodernity as the ear of the 'saturated self'" (p.26). Compared to Cushman, Gergen is much more positive.

Gergen, K. J. and Gergen, M. (1993) Autobiographies and the shaping of gendered lives, in N. Coupland and J. Hussbaum, [Eds.] (1993) Discourse and Lifespan Identity (London: Sage)
Gergen, K. J. (1999)  Social Construction and the Transformation of Identity Politics, in F. Newman and L. Holzman [Eds] (1999) End of knowing: A new developmental way of learning (New York: Routledge)
Gergen, K. J. (2000) An Invitation to Social Construction (London: Sage)

Parker's approach
Ian Parker: influences by Derrida and Foucault. Discourses: "coherent system of meaning". Work has "political edge". Discourses as 'real' material entities existing independently of the people who us them.

Potter and Wetherell
Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour (1987)
Trad. concepts incorporate 'mentalist' or 'cognitivist' assumptions. Language used to construct the world and self and thus achieve things. Focus on how the self is talked about rather than 'self-as-entity'. Importance of social and interactional context. Discourse focused on specific practices  rather than as material systems of meaning.

See also: Potter, J. (1996) Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction (London: Sage)

John Shotter
'Rhetorical responsive' approach, drawing on Wittgenstein, Bakhtin and Billig. Focus on conversational activities, whereby meaning "emerges in the context of interaction" (p.30). Social poetics.

Problems with social constructivist approaches
See:  Smith, M. (1994) Selfhood at risk: Postmodern perils and the perils of postmodernism, in American Psychologists, 49, pp.405-41; plus, Augoustinos, M. and Walker, I. (1995) Social Cognition (London Sage) - C10

Reflexivity tends to be omitted in postmodernist and discourse analysis approaches because there is a "loss" of any sense of people possessing a coherent identity. "We need to find some way in which we can appreciate the linguistic and discursive structuring of human psychology without losing sight of the essential personal, coherent and 'real' nature of individual experience and identity" (p.32)

Retrieving the subject - interpretive phenomenological analysis
Jonathan A. Smith
Smith, J. A. (1996) Beyond the divide between cognition and discourse: Using interpretative phenomenological analysis in health psychology, in Psychology & Health, 11(2) pp. 261 - 271
Realist epistemology, but qualitative methods to empathetically ascertain the insider's perspective, drawing on approaches used in social scientific study of health, particularly sociology.
However, focusing on the "insider" perspective and treating them at face value can potentially lead to uncritical accounts of such perspectives and risks downplaying wider structural issues.
Risk of romanticism.

Critical feminist psychological approaches
Henriques, J., Hollway, W., Urwin, C., Venn, C. & Walkerdine, V. (1998) Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity (London: Routledge)
Harvard Project on Women's Psychology and Girl's Development.

Narrative Psychology
"It is the central premise of this book that when we actually turn to examine the full range of experiences, knowledge and understandings of self that people live and struggle with, therein resides a sense of unity, continuity and coherence which simply does not gel with the radical fragmentation, disunity and absence promoted in theoretical and methodologically confined agendas of postmodernism and discourse analysis respectively." (p.41)

Struggle of sense of self vs non-self a central feature of human existence, especially in trauma.

C3: Narrative: living and being in time

Narrative as an 'organizing principle' for human life
Carr, D (1986) Time, Narrative and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press)
MacIntyre, A. (1981) After Virtue (NY: Notre Dame University Press)
Sarbin, T. R. [Eds] (1986) Narrative Psychology: The Stories Nature of Human Conduct (New York: Praeger)

Sarbin - narratory principle.
Narrative = organizing principle for human action

"... there is no way to give and understanding of any society ... except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resource. Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things." (MacIntyre, 1981, p.54)

Human experience and narrative structure
Carr (186) "argues that the reality of contemporary Western human life can be characterized as one which has a narrative or story-telling character" (p.48).
Draws upon phenomenology of Husserl.

Carr:  three levels of human experience:

Passive experience
"Our experience automatically assumes temporarily extended forms in which future, present and past mutually determine our another as parts of a whole" (p.48).
Active experience
Active experience explicitly consults past experiences or envisages future, viewing present as passage between past and future.
Ricoeur - two sorts of time in every story: (1) succession of events, and (2) the sort of time "...characterized by integration, culmination and closure..." (p.49).
Experience of self/life
Life story - bringing together and establishing connections between stories.
Kierkegaard "...argued that it is through the process of autobiographical selection that we become ethical beings; in the telling of our stories, we become responsible for our lives" (p.50).
According to Carr, "lives are told in being lived and lived in being told" (Carr, 1986, p.61)
Meaning is created in the course of life through the intertwining of action and narration.

Carr insists "...everyday life is permeated with narrative ... fiction and autobiography ... tend to reinforce and make more explicit the symbolization that is already at work in a culture at the level of practical human action  ... narratives such as autobiographies ... reveal structures or meanings that previously remained implicit or unrecognized, and thus to transform life and elevate it to another level" (p.52).

Criticisms of Carr et al
Unlike writers of fiction, human beings work within personal and circumstantial limits with regards to their own lives.
"Life, unlike the story, does not have an 'implicit contract' towards order" (p.54)
Ordered life = culture, e.g. Elias (1992) introduction of clocks and calendars.
Plus the usual postmodern criticisms, but "...approaches such as Gergen considerably overplay  the disorderly, chaotic and variable nature of contemporary human experience. On a routine, daily basis, there is more order and coherence than such accounts suggest" (p.56).

Trauma and narrative breakdown
Martin Heidegger (1962)- Angst
Existential crisis
Frank (1995) - narrative wreckage

Narrative and psychotherapy
Mental illness has been characterized in terms of problematized self-narrative.
Some psychotherapists view their practice in terms of story repair.
Spence, D. (1982) Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton) Spence suggests psychoanalytic narratives should be understood in terms of reconstruction rather than construction. Dreams are productive of meaning rather than products of meaning (States, 1988). Therapists are thus collaborators in producing narratives rather than archaeologists. Re-authoring by co-authoring (Schafer, 1992) perhaps given the position of power of the therapist, perhaps it really is re-authoring (Josselson, 1995).

"...there is a difference between acknowledging that a variety of frameworks can fit the same set of facts rendering them differentially significant, and denying the existence of those facts." (p.62)

"Part and parcel of this approach ... is the suggestion that we should not rely too much on the kinds of knowledge produced by powerful professional groups within society ... our own lay knowledge, although of course not divorced from dominant narrative structures of power and control, should be acknowledged as having equal and sometimes superior status to professional knowledge with regards to issues such as experience of self and identity" (p.63)

END