Autobiographical Construction Research Articles

Examining the episodic-semantic interaction during future thinking - A reanalysis of external details.

While traditional analyses of autobiographical construction tend to focus on the 'internal' or episodic details of the narrative, contemporary studies employing fine-grained scoring measures reveal the 'external' component to contain important information relevant to the individual's life story. Here, we used the recently developed NExt scoring protocol to explore profiles of external details generated by patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) (n = 11) and semantic dementia (SD) (n = 13) on a future thinking task. Overall, distinct NExt profiles were observed for future events in AD and SD. Specifically, AD patients provided significantly more Specific Episode external details compared with Controls. Using voxel-based morphometry, these increased external details within future narratives related to grey matter intensity in medial and lateral frontal regions in AD. By contrast, SD patients displayed an elevation of Specific Episode, Extended Episode, and General Semantic details during future simulation relative to Controls, which related to grey matter intensity of medial and lateral parietal regions. Our findings suggest that the compensatory external details generated during future simulation comprise an array of episodic and semantic details that vary in terms of specificity and self-relevance, which may be differentially affected depending on the locus of underlying neuropathology in dementia. Adopting a fine-grained approach to external details helps to characterise the interplay between episodic and semantic content during future stimulation and suggests potentially differential vulnerability and preservation of distinct components of the constructed narrative in clinical disorders.

Hume, Personal Identity, and the Experimental Method

The article focuses on the connection between David Hume’s explication of personal identity and what is supposed to be “experimental reasoning” introduced to moral subjects which the subtitle to the Treatise on Human Nature announces. On the basis of the results of analyses of the role of passions in creating personal identity I argue for the general coherence of Hume’s work. According to the interpretation, Hume’s intention was to present the multidimensionality of human identity in which the autobiographical construction of memory and understanding is supplemented with the identity built upon social relations. Eventually, personal identity finds its fulfilment in a person’s moral agency which reveals its practical dimension.

Paradoxes of the self: the autobiographical construction of the subject in the Italian Communist Party and in Italian neo-feminism

This article compares the autobiographical practices used by the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) in the aftermath of the Second World War with those developed by Italian neo-feminism from the late 1960s onwards. The former involved a repeated injunction for activists to write about and express themselves upon joining the party, in what amounted to self-criticism. The latter, meanwhile, took shape as a result of self-consciousness exercises practised by feminist groups in various cities across Italy. The terms of comparison of this article aim to describe what changed and what remained the same in the technologies used to produce the political self within the Italian Left in the twentieth century, beginning from its split in the 1960s. In this context, the paper reveals that the communist and feminist experiences were supported by the same discursive mechanism, which hinged on a paradoxical enunciation of the self. Communist activists and feminists thus faced the same difficulty in political self-expression, which was resolved in two different ways, both equally unsatisfactory. In conclusion, examining the communist autobiographical injunction allows a radical critical reappraisal of the idea that the use of the first person and the political affirmation of subjectivity are determining features exclusively bound to the feminist experience.

MULHERES E DITADURA: AS CONSTRUÇÕES AUTOBIOGRÁFICAS COMO LUGAR DE RESISTÊNCIAS

The presente paper proposes to analyze the book “Tropical Sol da Liberdade” by Ana Maria Machado and the documentaries “Que bom te ver viva” by Lucia Murat and “Vou contar para os meus filhos” by Tuca Siqueira, as spaces of building female memories referring to Brazilian civil-military dictatorship. Therefore, three points will be addressed: literary work and the autobiographical construction; documentaries as autobiographical spaces; and the testimony of women as space of resistance to forgetting and ereasing their experiences face of the dictatorial system. Along this path, intellectuals as Virginia Woolf, Audre Lord, Bell Hooks, inspire us to think about the of women’s narratives. And Beatriz Sarlo, Luiza Passerini, Ana Maria Colling, Margareth Rago and Susel Oliveira da Rosa help us to think about women’s memories and the experiences of militant women in the dictatorship period.

Miniatures of a Monumentalist: Berlioz's Romances, 1842–1850

This article reassesses Berlioz's complex relationship to the French romance. Berlioz is often regarded as a musical revolutionary who made his mark writing massive, path-breaking symphonies – a far cry from the popular songs that became a staple of the bourgeois woman's salon. Yet he wrote romances throughout his life. How are we to understand these songs in the context of his overall output? What did the genre mean to him? How do his romances relate to the larger works on which his reputation rests? I explore these questions in relation to the romances he composed or revised between 1842 and 1850, a period often regarded as a fallow one for Berlioz but one that nonetheless saw a surge of songwriting activity. Drawing upon recent theories about the autobiographical construction of Berlioz's music, and considering when these songs were written or revised, to whom they were dedicated, what images were associated with them and how their texts relate to the events of Berlioz's biography, I argue that their conventionality belies a deeply personal resonance and a musical ingenuity uncommon to the romance genre. As a whole, these songs show Berlioz returning to an intimate and direct style during an especially introspective and nostalgic period of his life. Even more, they suggest that his urge toward self-reflection was not confined to the programmatic and the large-scale, and that his miniatures and monuments have more in common than one might think.

Autobiographical delusion and subjectivation: problems in diagnosis and treatment during adolescence

Adolescence is the time when methods and contents of autobiographical construction are acquired. Wordsworth’s “The Prelude” is an example of a project of creating an autobiographical self as opposed to uncertainty about one’s own capacities and difficulties in achieving an ideal. In the poem, it’s possible to discern the appearance of what Tulving defines as “the representational abuse”: a failure in the examination of reality and specifically in the discrimination between memories originated from the perceptive experience and those arising from self‐generated processes. The autobiographical function appears to be useful in coping with emotional challenges during adolescence. Patients diagnosed with schizophrenic disorders, however, often have particular difficulties in this domain. Once the autobiographical delusion appears, treatment becomes extremely complex: the observing self can be projected onto the therapist, who may observe the patient but not interact with the pathological narration nor modify the ‘representational abuse’. The paralysis of the therapist, and how to get out of it, become major challenges. The solution may be the choice of an integrated therapeutic approach, in which psychotherapy, psychopharmacology and rehabilitation are combined. This kind of intervention requires a consistent setting, enabling the therapist to apply a deep analysis of transference and countertransference.

Fernando Vallejo: la (re)creación de Colombia a partir de las post-identidades

Este artículo busca analizar, desde el ámbito de la Teoría de la Literatura y la Literatura Comparada, la novelística de Vallejo y su compleja creación de identidades a través del discurso. En efecto, el universo textual ideado por el autor plantea una doble relación. Por un lado, pone en diálogo a los personajes con el espacio que transitan bajo la atenta mirada del cuerpo como mediador de las acciones y, por otra, vincula su construcción autobiográfica ficcional con el deseo homoerótico como parte de su propuesta personal y política. Así, desde una Colombia imaginada y que se fragmenta – así como se fragmenta la identidad contemporánea—, y como hijo bastardo de la generación literaria de boom, Vallejo busca representar y transgredir tanto las identidades literarias en sus textos como el canon al que pertenece su obra, para desde esta plataforma –el texto— hablar de posibilidades nuevas del sujeto, de la Literatura y de Colombia como espacio real e imaginado.

IREL – A Psychometric Instrument for Measuring Life Themes

Background: Although biographical narratives and work involving the meaning of biographical episodes is a central focus in any psychotherapy, there remains a lack of psychometric instruments for measuring the autobiographical construction as such. We will be presenting a theoretical model of an autobiographical construction of life themes and the Interview of Retrospective Exploration of Life themes (IREL) will be used as the basis of a psychometric instrument. The IREL takes about 90–120 min. The interrater reliability and test-retest reliability will be examined. Methods: Two samples of 21 and 23 mentally healthy subjects were recruited. In addition to the IREL, the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and SCID were also used to control for psychopathological status and depressive mood. Results: According to our data, biographical events can be explored objectively and reliably using the IREL. Minor test-retest variability of the affective valence of life themes is not state-dependent. Conclusions: Setting aside limitations due to the small sample sizes, the results suggest that the proposed interview is an objective and reliable instrument for measuring central issues within the subjective biographical construction (life themes).

Psychotherapy as a Process of Transformation: Analysis of Posttherapeutic Autobiographic Narrations

Psychotherapy research is still dominated by the drug metaphor, based—in analogy to medical treatment—on the natural science paradigm. Yet this scientific metamodel has its limitations in explaining the complex developments occurring within and after the therapeutic process. Once psychotherapy is understood as a social interaction conveying different aspects of knowledge (concerning behavior as well as self-related experiences and interpretations), you must shift to models and research questions based on the social sciences. In this article, I present the results of a study based on autobiographical narratives of discharged clients of the same psychotherapy ward. We show that new experiences from psychotherapy are integrated, and thereby assimilated, into the previous person schemas. The potential for this integration contributes decisively to the long-term effect of psychotherapy. By using the methods of “social scientific hermeneutics” and ideal typification, we reconstructed the transformation of psychotherapeutic knowledge into four typical structures. These types differ in several respects: (a) their systems of autobiographical construction, i.e., complex metaschemas which develop during a lifetime, (b) their subjective concepts about emotional disorders and about psychotherapy, and (c) their future orientations.

H. G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography (review)

Reviewed by: H. G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography John Huntington H. G. Wells . H. G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography. Ed. G. P. Wells. Boston: Little, 1984. 253pp. $16.95. In its broad outlines, this book, written between 1935 and 1942 but unpublished until now, does not reveal anything that is not already known to a reader of Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie's biography of Wells. The first section, Wells's memoir of his wife, is familiar as the Introduction to The Book of Catherine Wells, and the third and final section, a short "looseleaf diary," is a rather superficial addition to the Experiment in Autobiography, though it has some marvelous touches, such as a paragraph recounting a conversation with Freud. Most interesting to students of Wells is the middle section, a series of long sketches of some important women in Wells's life—Amber Reeves, Rebecca West, Elizabeth von Arnim, Odette Keun, and Moura Budberg. When it was written, the publication of such a narrative of Wells's nonmarital relationships with women would have been scandalous. Today, when the basic story is more public than even Wells himself seems to have wanted to make it (he does not mention Margaret Sanger here), we look to such a text not for revelations but for evidence of the distortion, fabrication, and omission that autobiographical construction entails. The memoir needs to be read in [End Page 804] the context of Wells's other works and of the versions of other interested participants. Wells in Love offers some charming anecdotes but little new biographical information about Wells's liaisons with Amber Reeves, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Rebecca West. In the case of the long affair with West, a variety of recent sources have given us a full and complex picture of that relationship (particularly Anthony West, H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life; and Gordon Ray, H. G. Wells and Rebecca West), and we may find Wells in Love more polite than explicit, most interesting for the details it omits. The portrait of Odette Keun, done in anger soon after the dissolution of the relationship, lacks the polite distance Wells brings to the earlier portraits. Wells depicts here a much more difficult person than the woman the Mackenzies sketch and a more interestingly eccentric one than he himself creates in Apropos of Dolores. Yet, despite its claim to hostile accuracy, this is not an entirely trustworthy narrative. For example, Wells here reasserts without repeating his earlier elegiac description of his departure from the house he had built for Keun and himself. We may want to set against this scene of noble renunciation Anthony West's more humiliating version of that departure: "He had been sent packing. Odette had thrown him out." Revelations of another sort appear in the depiction of Wells's relationship with Moura Budberg. In the final passages of the Experiment in Autobiography, describing his trip to the USSR and his meetings with Stalin and Gorky, Wells gives no hint that he had just become aware of Budberg's double life (Anthony West is convinced that she must have been closely associated with the KGB). Wells in Love makes Wells's bafflement and pain clear, but then, surprisingly, it leaves the huge ambiguities of Budberg's behavior unexplored. H. G. Wells in Love is important not because it offers a "true" version of what is elsewhere "fictionalized" but because it contributes detail to an autobiographical and artistic site whose excavation may uncover needs and strategies much too essential to Wells's own psyche for him ever to have consciously understood or described them. John Huntington University of Illinois, Chicago Copyright © 1986 Purdue Research Foundation

Presence, Absence, and the Difference: Wordsworth's Autobiographical Construction of the Romantic Ego

Presence, Absence, and the Difference: Wordsworth's Autobiographical Construction of the Romantic Ego