NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF PERSONALITY’S EXPERIENCE

Abstract

Narrative construction of personality’s experience is interpreted as a semantic integration of single eventive blocks of individual's life into a coherent wholeness by means of speech practices in process of personality’s meaning creation. Within the framework of psychological and hermeneutic approach, personality’s experience is considered as a semantic system constructed from running events (personality’s experience) by selecting events that are significant for a personality at the current moment and by arranging them into certain narrative structures. The leading mechanism of this process is interpretation, which considers the generation of new meanings through the use of process of dialogic interaction between internal and external contexts of a personality. At the same time, cultural patterns, which reflect the main sociocultural interpretive schemes, play a significant role in the process of narrative construction of experience. Construction of personality’s experience, understanding reality and oneself in it is one of the most important conditions for personality’s development, since the semantic structures of a personality reflect and objectify in a narrative. These very structures ensure the orientation of a personality in the sphere of one’s existence in a socio-cultural environment, that is, they act as mechanisms of semantic regulation of human’s activities. The main kinds of narrative construction of experience are therefore quasi-narrative, narrative and meta-narrative, and its main types are situational, eventive and semantic. The leading psychological mechanisms are quasi-interpretation, interpretation and dialogue.