The parameters of primacy, unity and the giving of the self crumbled under this analysis. Building on the previous exploration of the broader 'narrative turn' in the humanities, this chapter places narrative psychology as a distinct development within this historical and theoretical context.
The Emergence of Narrative Psychology
From their position, Schafer and Spence presented a narrative reading of psychoanalysis rather than arguments for the narrative nature of the psychoanalytic approach. James further introduced a conception of the empirical self as consisting of the material self, the social self, and the spiritual self.
Dan McAdams: Identity as a Life Story
Polkinghorne notes that the relationship between different levels within McAdam's model – traits, situational reactions (goals and struggles) and narrative identity – is not clearly specified. The second set of concerns outlined by Polkinghorne addresses the question of the historical situation of McAdams' model of identity as a life story.
Hubert Hermans: The Dialogical Self Theory
To expand these considerations, Hermans and Kempen further mobilized Bakhtin's dialogical approach, particularly the notion of the polyphonic novel. From the point of view of Hermans and Hermans-Konopka, emotions are of direct importance to the functioning of the dialogic self, because they can hinder or facilitate the dialogic relationship between different positions within the self and between the self and the other.
Michael White and David Epston
Barresi notes, 'Even if the self can include its own past and future, it can never include the consciousness or activity of the other.
Narrative Therapy
Narrative Psychology: Limitations, Tensions and Challenges
It privileges the 'how' of narrative research and the position of a storyteller rather than a researcher. The core of Strawson's critique seems to be aimed at the notion that narrativity as a principle of psychological functioning is natural and universal: "The aspiration for clear narrative self-articulation is natural to some—for some, it may even be useful—but in others it is very unnatural and destructive' (Strawson.
The Critique of the Subject
Life Story: Identity, Subject
The Dialogical Self Theory: Towards Decentralization
Hermans's view differs significantly from McAdams's regarding the unity and centeredness of the self - the former is much more in favor of multiple and decentered understanding. Compared to McAdams, Hermans moves away from a modernist discourse of the self as a coherent, centered, bounded entity. The dialogical self-model is formed on the basis of the comparison of the three models of the self - traditional, modern and postmodern -.
Narrative Therapy: Between Subjectivation and Agency
Based on narrative therapy's commitment to action and self-directedness, some critics argue that White and Epston's understanding of the subject bears similarities to the modernist paradigm. Foucault's connection between power and knowledge is at the heart of White and Epston's contextual understanding of people's lives and the narrative frameworks people use to constitute their lives. However, for White and Epston, the agency and self-direction of the subject is not a given resource but a challenge to narrative therapy.
Conclusion
From this point of view, narrative therapy can be thought of as one of the techniques of self-identification, and the self-descriptive narratives that emerge in this process - as practices of identity. Such a position corresponds to what Holstein and Gubrium describe as an 'affirmative' reaction to the postmodern critique of the subject. 4 I move on to consider the important issue of continuity and change of the narrative subject.
Narrative Subject: Between Continuity and Transformation
Stability and Change: Psychological and Narratological Perspectives
Similar tensions can be observed regarding the issue of stability and change in narratology, where some of the story's many connotations more easily align it with stability than with change. In his groundbreaking monograph Morphology of the Folktale, Propp outlines a formal model of a Russian fairy tale. As an example, McAdams pointed to changes in the salience of concerns about generativity, which appear to increase among older adults.
Hermans’s Dialogical Self: Meaning as Movement
Hermans concludes that 'The interiorization of the dialogue with the other, in the self, functions as a developmental basis for the dialogic relationship with the other-in-the-self' (Hermans and Hermans-Konopka. Based on the work of Valsiner, an important contributor to developing the dialogic self-theory, Hermans and Hermans-Konopka delineate the following characteristics of promoter positions: Promoter positions play a key role in the multi-level model of self-development that Hermans and Hermans-Konopka introduce to account for the temporal aspect of dialogic self-functioning .
White and Epston’s Narrative Therapy
This contrasts with Bakhtin's insistence on the ever-evolving, unresolved, open-ended character of human life – which Bakhtin claims Dostoevsky's characters embody as models of a truly dialogical and polyphonic approach to consciousness: “an inner incompleteness, their ability to grow, so to speak, from within and make untrue any externalizing and ultimate definition of them' (Bakhtin 1973: 59). In Dostoevsky's artistic thinking, the authentic life of a personality takes place at the point of discrepancy between man and himself, at his point of departure beyond the limits of everything that exists as a material being, a being that can be observed. on, defined, predicted past one's will, 'second hand'. As in the literary space the model of a completed and finished human life is possible in some genres, in psychology, which deals with a living human being who struggles, such a model is problematic.
Storying’ and ‘Re-Storying’ Lives
Conclusion
A conflict between static and dynamic definitions of narrative depends directly on the understanding of the nature and extent of stability and change of identity. This appears to be a significant factor in the appropriation of the idea of narrative by McAdams, Hermans and White and Epston. Think big with small stories in narrative and identity analysis." In Narrative – State of the Art.
Gergen (2001) highlights several contemporary assumptions that continue to shape the understanding and practice of psychology: the centrality of individual knowledge, the assumption of the world as objectively given, and the understanding of language as the bearer of truth. This conception of the person itself cannot be verified or falsified by observation; rather, linguistic prestructure is essential to guide and interpret any observations we make. As suggested by Alasdair MacIntyre in his reflection on the centenary of psychology as a science, psychology, unlike the natural sciences and more than any other social science, operates not alone.
The Dialogical Self Theory, Valuation Theory and the Self-Confrontation
The metaphor of the motivated storyteller at the core of Hermans' model is complemented by the assumption of dialogism. A valuation has a positive (pleasant), negative (unpleasant) or ambivalent connotation in the eyes of the individual. The study of the affective component can therefore reveal which motive is active in a particular valuation and in the system as a whole.
The Maps of Narrative Practice
It is a typical construction of the kind of depth psychology that so saturates Western culture', note White and Epston. In their analysis of power and its multiple effects, White and Epston are guided by Foucault's analysis of the power/knowledge connection discussed in Ch. Externalizing the problem allows them to move to the next stage in their therapeutic process: challenging the techniques of power.
Conclusion
However, it is only in the work of White and Epston that the challenges of the ideological level are fully met. In general, this analysis poses the question of the possibility of integrating different methodologies in narrative psychology. For its part, the possibility of methodological pluralism raises a critical question of the evaluation of truth claims, which necessarily entails examining the key relationship between truth and ethics.
Ethics and Academic Psychology
The ethical dimension of the subject concept itself, which any particular movement in psychology assumes, attracts little analysis or reflection, despite the fact that these constructs can be argued to have crucial ethical implications. In many important ways, these constructions of the subject resonate with the larger debates about the ethical questions that have underpinned philosophical developments throughout the twentieth century. On the other hand, the decentering of the subject expressed by these critiques has itself presented a challenging task in dealing with the question of ethical agency 'after' the subject (eg Nancy).
Self as a Story: Plot, Temporality, Closure from an Ethical Point of View
It is this sense of exclusivity that is placed at the beginning of McAdams' redemptive streak. The exclusive category of chosen people that the redemptive self-model attributes to Americans seems deeply problematic in light of contemporary debates in continental philosophy. McAdams's theorization of the question of generativity sheds further light on the role of the Other in the ethical system encompassed by the story of redemption.
The Dialogical Self: Between Polyphony and Power
The increasing multiplicity of self and identity, the need for the development of a dialogic capacity and the necessity to recognize the alterity of the other person with whom one enters into dialogic contact' (Hermans and Dimaggio 2007: 40) . This step requires careful attention, as much more is at stake here than a change from the rhetorical register of the notions of recognition of absolute alterity to the algorithm of turn-taking, which is dictated by the need to operationalize the philosophical notion of to make. dialogue for psychological use. At the interface of the social and the biological, we see a paradoxical situation: while globalization has the potential to increase the density and heterogeneity of positions of the self in unprecedented ways, it simultaneously evokes forms of localization that are driven. by deep-rooted biological needs that cause a serious reduction and limitation of positions in the repertoire of the self.
The Ethics of Narrative Therapy
White insists that, on the contrary, what must be achieved from the beginning of the therapeutic engagement is a particular 'experience-near' definition of the problem. Moreover, the one-to-one interaction in narrative practice is typically supplemented by the involvement of the wider community members. Epston refers to White's intense engagement with the writing of Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an anthropologist who insisted on the primacy of the ethical dimension in anthropological inquiry.
Conclusion: From Ethical Practice to the Practice of Ethics
For Taylor, the ethical dimension is always already present in the narrative rendering of life experience, as it can only take place in relation to a certain understanding of the good. An emphasis on the re-examination of the notion of the good life also marks MacIntyre's strong engagement with ethics and narrativity. Narrative understanding of ethics is non-ontological and is not grounded in substantive notions of the good life.
