Legitimar el pasado. Tendencias autonómicas y representaciones identitarias santafesinas en el relato autobiográfico del gobernador Domingo Crespo (c. 1847-1854)

The article analyzes the relationship between narrative identity, unconscious memory structures, and cultural context. The main attention is paid to the division into ‘internal’ (autobiographical, based on personal experience) narratives and ‘external’ (cultural, historical, and social metanarratives) elements of identity construction. The paper uses the concept of ‘identity narrative’ — the unconscious basis of identity formed by non-declarative memory that precedes reflexive autobiographical narration. To explain the connection between narrative identity and the unconscious, the concept of ‘narrative unconscious’ is introduced. It is a non-reflexive way of perceiving things, their assessments, and interaction with them, what constitutes the unconscious cultural horizon of the individual; an unconscious, but perceived dimension of traditions. ‘Narrative unconscious’ is an aspect of identity that contains an unarticulated and unconscious connection between personal history and the cultural environment. Using examples from the works of M. Freeman, A. MacIntyre and C. Milosz, it is demonstrated how personal experience of interaction with collective narratives forms an often unconscious unity of the individual and the transpersonal. It is argued that the analysis of narrative identity should include not only questions about the ways of constructing an autobiographical narrative and its meanings, but also the question of distinguishing between the multiple sources that construct personal identity. This implies the creation of an expanded model of narrative identity, understood as a dynamic process in which the conscious construction of autobiography is associated with the use of implicit and unconscious culturally mediated elements of memory.

How narrative identity and well-being are intertwined as emerging adults process their lived experiences remains a critical theoretical and empirical question. We studied narrative identity among US emerging adults in a multiphase study. We aimed to test (1) if and how narrative identity themes (i.e., coherence, agency, growth) change rapidly across repeated narrations; (2) are related to reports of psychological adjustment (i.e., well-being, recent stress) over time; and (3) whether the valence of the autobiographical event nuanced the ways narrative identity and adjustment co-evolve. In a mini-longitudinal study conducted over three months, 300 adults aged 18-to-29-years (M age = 24.39years; 60% women) provided autobiographical narratives about high-point and low-point (LP) life events at five time points, as well as repeated reports on well-being and recent stress. Overall, coherence showed (1) the most consistency across time and valence than other narrative themes and (2) the most consistent associations with adjustment. In multilevel models, LP coherence and LP growth coincided with higher levels of adjustment. Findings reinforce the ways narrative identity reflects dynamic processes of understanding the events of one's life, and the ways individual differences in framing and reasoning about life are important for psychological adjustment.

Breast cancer (BC) in younger age is a critical and potentially traumatic experience that can interrupt the continuity of self-narrative during a crucial phase. In the Narrative Identity framework the translation of memories into autobiographical narratives is an internal and external process that plays a key role in meaning-making, social relationships and self-coherence. The aim of this study is to examine the role and function that autobiographical memory narratives (AMN) play in the process of adaptation to BC medical treatment. Seventeen BC women below 50 years received prompts to provide autobiographical memory narratives at four phases during their treatment (pre-hospitalization-T1-post-surgery-T2-chemo-radio therapy-T3-follow-up-T4). The Emotional Processing Scale (EPS) was also administered. In all, 68 AMN were collected. A three step procedure of data analysis was conducted. The first one, an empirically-derived memory coding manual to analyze key dimensions of AMN was developed: Agency; Emotional Regulation and Interpersonal Relations. Findings show a particular vulnerability in narrative identity faced by BC women during the shift from T1-T3. In the second one, an emotional coping profile for each woman focusing on the shift from T1-T3 was created. For the third step, these profiles were compared with the EPS scores. The final results suggest the capacity of the AMNs to differentiate the women's emotional adaptation over the course of the BC treatment. Despite the study's limitations, it supports the use of AMN as clinical device to construct a deeper knowledge and profiling trajectory of how women have internalized and elaborated past encounters with illness and help providers, as well as their prior experience of bodily/psychological health and integrity. This information adds to an understanding of their current efforts at recovery and adaptation. In this way we believe that the recollection of narrative memories, not only at the end of the cancer treatment but also during its process, could help the women to mend the broken continuity of their narrative self, as they seek to maintain a healthy balance of internal resources across their past, present, and projected future.

Grief theories have converged on the idea that the sharing of autobiographical memory narratives of loss and of the deceased person, especially within the family, is a major way to maintain and/or reconfigure a healthy sense of identity after a loss. In contrast, we examine unspoken memory—the withholding of socially sharing autobiographical memories about the loss and the departed family member—as a way to either conserve an existing narrative identity or assert a new narrative identity. Depending on its context and function, silence about memory can play either a positive or negative role in an individual griever's ongoing narrative identity, as well as in the larger family narrative in which the griever's identity is embedded.

Institutional systems steeped in colonialist and essentializing language (and practice) produce narratives of displacement that are reductionist, rendering the displaced as one-dimensional. Through narratives focused on victimhood, these narratives are used against people who are displaced, situating them with fixed identities of vulnerability. Autobiographical narratives of displacement, however, can challenge those reductionist narratives by representing the complexity of displacement experience. By doing so, autobiographical displacement narratives highlight the ways that displacement is only one aspect of identity, thereby subverting the victim trope and asking us to consider the layered ways one experiences displacement. In this article, I describe the ways that rhetorical practices within autobiographical narratives such as interiority, temporality, and embodiment transgress institutional narratives. By theorizing archives in motion as counter narrative to constructions of vulnerability and precarity, we can examine alternative ways of reporting history and documenting identities, across transnational contexts, with the potential to challenge understandings of historical events through archival content and practice.

“Listing the Body: Embodied Experience and Identity in Autobiographical Graphic Illness Narratives” examines the popular use of lists in autobiographical graphic illness narratives to determine how they are used to address the subject’s embodied experience of illness. After a brief discussion of what lists are and how they have been said to function in literary texts, attention is given to examining how the verbal and visual lists included in several autobiographical graphic illness narratives narrate identity as understood across the body, in the mind of the self, and in the mind of others. Asking how lists function within autobiographical graphic illness narratives to address the ill subject’s fluctuating understanding of self as an embodied being, the article concludes that lists narrate the subject’s lived experience of illness.

We studied direct and indirect associations of attachment, trait hope, and motivations in narrative identity (agency and communion) with measures of well-being during emerging adulthood. Our aim was to determine whether hope and expressed motivations serve as mechanisms between attachment and well-being. We focused on emerging adults, for whom attachment, character, and narrative identity are well-developed and salient for developmental challenges of identity development and clarity for one’s life direction. In Study 1, college- and community-recruited adults (N = 366) wrote autobiographical narratives about future goals and self-reported attachment, hope, and well-being. Results supported indirect effects between attachment and outcomes of future goal agency and well-being via hope, as well as an indirect effect between hope and the outcome of personal growth via future goal agency. In Study 2, college adults (N = 288) wrote autobiographical narratives of their college transition experiences and self-reported attachment, hope, and well-being. Results supported indirect effects between attachment and outcomes of college transition communion and measures of well-being via hope, as well as an indirect effect between hope and the outcome of recent stress via college transition communion. Findings suggest the importance of hope as a mechanism linking emerging adults’ attachment with well-being. Findings also suggest benefits to quantifying autobiographical narratives alongside self-reports to inform well-being across adult development.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe psychiatric condition that is associated with functional impairment and pathological traits. It has been argued that identity impairment is one of the core features of BPD, which can be manifested in different ways, including fragmented autobiographical narratives. Here, we considered both the traditional and modern conceptualizations of BPD to examine the relation between identity impairment, as operationalized through autobiographical memory, and features of BPD. We hypothesized that BPD features would be associated with higher levels of fragmentation in narrative identity, narrative intimacy, and narrative coherence in participants' autobiographical memory. To test this hypothesis, we recruited 298 university students who were administered a series of self-report measures of BPD and were asked to describe an autobiographical memory about a turning point in their lives. Narrative identity, but not narrative intimacy nor coherence, was the dominant predictor of BPD features. We discuss our findings in terms of how individuals with features of BPD struggle with many aspects of a distorted sense of self. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Cognitive scripts and narrative identity are shaped by structures of power

Autobiographical memory narratives that emerge in therapeutic discourse can aid the understanding of the client?s narrative identity and the identification of cen-tral themes or conflicts. The study aimed to examine the structure and thematic content of autobiographical memory narratives of five clients with Borderline Personality Dis-order (BPD), during the early phase of individual psychotherapy. The Biopsychosocial Interview gathered narrative material about the clients? life experiences in childhood and adulthood and explored the history of psychological difficulties and/or disorders. The interview and the first five sessions of psychotherapy for each client were audio record-ed, transcribed and coded for analysis. The Coding System for Autobiographical Memory Narratives in Psychotherapy was used to identify autobiographical memory narratives from the clients? life experiences, rate the narrative complexity, specificity and integration, and derive narrative patterns or themes. Analysis indicated that the narra-tives had a moderate level of complexity, low levels of specificity, were predominantly autobiographical, poorly integrated and revealed dominant themes of contamination. Narrative themes of agency, communion and redemption were relatively lower among the clients. The implications for therapeutic practice, training of clinicians and future re-search are discussed.

Preview of the article : Ever since the publication of Fictions in Autobiography in 1985, Paul John Eakin has been a major presence in the field of autobiography studies. As with his other monographs, Eakin’s latest work, Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative, brings together elegance and range, as well as clarity and conceptual complexity. Like his other works, too, Living Autobiographically covers a wide range of theoretical and autobiographical texts. While not indifferent to literary theory per se, Eakin (as has been apparent for some time) is profoundly stimulated by theory that goes beyond not only the literary but also the humanities. Most notable in this monograph is Eakin’s use of recent research in neurobiology. With regard to his choice of autobiographical texts for discussion, most are American, though Eakin does discuss the Australian writer David Malouf (a long-time favorite of Eakin’s), as well as the Norwegian autobiographical narratives analyzed in Marianne Gullestad’s Everyday Life Philosophers: Modernity, Morality, and Autobiography in Norway (1996). Eakin’s interest in Gullestad’s work, which is based on a project that elicited autobiographical narratives from “ordinary” individuals, shows that he is not solely concerned with so-called “literary” texts, something also seen in his discussion of the “Portraits of Grief ” series that appeared in the New York Times in the wake of 9/11. Bringing together such disparate texts, auto/biographical procedures, and theoretical concerns is an ambitious enterprise. Most ambitious of all is that Living Autobiographically brings “culturalist” and biological frameworks together as a way of answering the question

Narrative identity allows individuals to integrate their personal experiences into a coherent and meaningful life story. Addictive disorders appear to be associated with a disturbed sense of self, reflected in problematic and disorganized self-narratives. In recent literature, a growing body of research has highlighted how narrative approaches can make a dual contribution to the understanding of addiction: on the one hand, by revealing crucial aspects of self structure, and, on the other, by supporting the idea that addiction is a disorder related to unintegrated self-states in which dissociative phenomena and the resulting sense of 'loss of self' are maladaptive strategies for coping with distress. This conceptual review identified the main measures of narrative identity, i.e., narrative coherence and complexity, agency, and emotions, and critically examines 9 quantitative and qualitative studies (out of 18 identified in literature), that have investigated the narrative dimension in people with an addictive disorder in order to provide a synthesis of the relationship between self, narrative and addiction. These studies revealed a difficulty in the organization of narrative identity of people with an addictive disorder, which is reflected in less coherent and less complex autobiographical narratives, in a prevalence of passivity and negative emotions, and in a widespread presence of themes related to a lack of self-efficacy. This review points out important conceptual, methodological and clinical implications encouraging further investigation of narrative dimension in addiction.

Expression and detection of triarchic psychopathy traits in the self-defining memories of U.S. undergraduates

This article examines Sami Said’s book Monomani (2013) with a focus on the intersection between narrative and cultural identity. Monomani is a seemingly autobiographical account of Sami’s struggle to write Said’s debut novel Väldigt sällan fin (2013). It takes the form of a letter to his friend Sara where he apologizes for withdrawing from her while finishing writing his book. The analysis takes its departure from a dilemma that Said has described in interviews and radio programs: he writes to express his true self, liberated from a limiting and falsifying identity imposed on him by others based on his ethnicity and religion; but when he writes about himself, he thereby also causes an inner division and a falsification of his own self. This dilemma is placed within a theoretical framework of narrative and cultural identity, focusing on the issues of authenticity and autobiographical narration. The theoretical discussion highlights, on the one hand, how authenticity in a both narrative and cultural context can be conceptualized in terms of what Mark Freeman and Jens Brockmeier have called narrative integrity, and, on the other hand, the critique of monological autobiographical identity both by autobiography scholar like Georges Gusdorf and Paul John Eakin and by theorists of selfhood like Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero. Based on these premises, the analysis of Monomani shows how Sami, the narrator of Monomani, achieves narrative integrity by disposing of cultural identity and attaining the identity of author but that he can do so only through a monological narration which refers back to his fictionalization of himself in Väldigt sällan fin and which severs the connection between life and narrative. In the second part of the analysis, it is then shown how Monomani undermines the validity of this monological account by thematizing the scenes of address that, according to Butler, structure self-narration. The analysis concludes by arguing that, through emulation of Gertrude Stein’s autobiographical writing, Said creates in his two books an integrated autofictional work where the positions of narrator and reader are doubled and fictionalized, whereby the dilemma of an alienating cultural identity is returned to its dialogical foundation and turned into an appeal for recognition of identity beyond social categorization.

Two independent mixed method studies are aimed at exploration of the major process of negotiation with an internalization of the master narrative, which assists as the cultural framework for narrative identity development. It analysed and compared the data obtained from same-sex desire individuals, ex-convicts and ordinary Georgian citizens, and traced the process of autobiographical reasoning and negotiation with autobiographical master narrative as the mean for development alternative master narrative, which, in turn, serves as the avenue for overcoming stigma, achieving resocialization and generativity, and coming in accord to one’s own identity. The comparative analysis addressed the following questions: How do research participants construct biographical alternative master narrative? Does this narrative lead to generativity? Does autobiographical reasoning mediate development of alternative master narrative? Altogether 30 life stories (16 same-sex desired persons and 14 ex-convicts) or 840 narratives were coded for narrative autobiographical reasoning, generativity, as well as for narrative structure (redemption and contamination). Besides, thematic comparative analysis was carried out. Qualitative analysis revealed the main thematic lines of the life stories, such as stigmatization and victimization, family relations, hard childhood experiences, urge for generativity, resocialization and identity formation. Research participants from both samples constructed their life stories or narrative identities through bringing on the surface the implicit master narrative and creating their own alternative one via either shifting and replacing the events or modifying sequences of the events included in the normative life story or autobiographical master narrative.