Coherent Life Story Research Articles

Autobiographical reasoning: Arguing and narrating from a biographical perspective

Autobiographical reasoning is the activity of creating relations between different parts of one's past, present, and future life and one's personality and development. It embeds personal memories in a culturally, temporally, causally, and thematically coherent life story. Prototypical autobiographical arguments are presented. Culture and socializing interactions shape the development of autobiographical reasoning especially in late childhood and adolescence. Situated at the intersection of cognitive and narrative development and autobiographical memory, autobiographical reasoning contributes to the development of personality and identity, is instrumental in efforts to cope with life events, and helps to create a shared history.

Coherent deviants: Transformation and transition in life-stories of once-married women who chose to live as lesbians

Married women who choose to live as lesbians in Israel are expected to perform a transition. In a culture that maintains a system of binaries by classifying heterosexuality as opposite to lesbianism, lesbian women are expected to 'cross' discursive borders, to abandon heterosexual identity, desire and kinship and to emerge as 'natural' or coherent lesbians. They are also expected to explain the 'scandal' that lies at the very foundation of such a 'transformation,' and to maintain firmly situated belief systems that do not confuse the 'old' and 'new' identities. The purpose of this paper is to map discursive sites where transition and transformation are expected in order to establish a coherent life story. The study analyzes life stories of once married Jewish–Israeli women who chose to live as lesbians. Following the notion of a life story as a cultural device for structuring experience into socially shareable narrative and the notion of identity as performance, I discuss the ambivalent response to the expectation to construct a coherent narrative of transition.

Picturing Family Histories: Torill Kove and Lene Ask

TO READ COMICS requires an understanding of two factor: first, what is pictured inside the frame of each comics panel, and second, what is implied in the space outside the frame. This article compares two texts, both combinations of word and image, to see how the narratives use the photograph within the medium of comics to tell a family history. Photographs are not the main focus of the narratives, but their inclusion creates a full stop in the otherwise cartoon or animated universe that begs interpretative attention. The two texts are Hitler, Jesus og farfar (Hitler, Jesus, and Grandpa) by the Norwegian photographer Lene Ask and Den danske dikteren (The Danish Poet) by the Norwegian-Canadian director Torill Kove. In particular, I focus on the use of photographs within the visual text to produce a point of reference around which the narrator builds a new story via closure by recreating the story beyond the frames. Patricia Holland writes that family photography, or what she calls personal photography, developed as a medium through which individuals confirm and explore their identity, that sense of selfhood which is an indispensable feature of a modern sensibility (Holland 119). A researcher in the history of television, photography, and representations of childhood, Holland has written much on the use of family photography to assist in narrative creation. The narrators of these two stories rely on variations of personal photographs to explore their identities by attempting to find what lies beyond the frame of a given image. Their contemporary stories incorporate visual evidence from the proverbial family photo album and work back in time to recreate a family history where framed photos play a central role in meaning construction based on a series of formative life moments, the narrators try to fill in the gaps of missing information to piece together a coherent life story. The photograph opens several points of interpretation to understand the self: the photo itself as an icon, the bodies pictured inside the frame, and the integration of art and identity within photography. These three elements unpack the seeming simplicity of these pictorial texts by Ask and Kove. After a discussion of the structure and symbol of the flame and photograph itself, I will then read what is inside the frame (the bodies) followed by the information outside the frame (the context) to show how photography complements the genre of comics and animation to support the thematic project of construction of the self. I argue that the act of reading the combination of word, image, and space in these visual texts is a construction of meaning that parallels the way the protagonists search for their own identity. These authors have made a name for themselves in the course of this decade. Lene Ask was born in 1974 near Stavanger and now lives in Oslo. Ask debuted as an author in 2006 with the graphic novel Hitler, Jesus og farfar. In Ask's multimodal text, a nameless narrator travels from Oslo to Germany on an art stipend to take self-portraits. While in Berlin, she searches for information about her unknown German grandfather and, in the process, begins to come to terms with her self, her art, her religion, and her sensitive family history, Ask has won several awards for the text, including the 2006 Sproing Prize for the year's best comics debuting in Norway. (1) Ask has also written and illustrated a children's picture book. Torill Kove was born in 1958 in Hamar, and now lives in Montreal, Quebec. Kove has directed two animated short films and illustrated four children's picture books with authors Henrik Hovland and, most recently, Endre Lund Eriksen. Kove wrote, animated, and directed Den danske dikteren, a prize-winning animated short film that won two prestigious animation awards in 2007: a Prix Genie Award in Canada and an Academy Award in the United States. (2) In the film, a nameless narrator tells the story of how her parents met. …

Meaning Making, Uncertainty Reduction, and the Functions of Autobiographical Memory: A Relational Framework

Three interrelated propositions are used to formulate a conceptual framework for understanding how the widely reported functions of autobiographical memory (a.m.)—the self, social, and directive functions—are related, complementary, and purposive. The existential literature provides a structure of meaningful relationships among various existential elements that are represented in a.m. It is argued that humans are meaning-makers driven by the need to make and understand relations within socially constructed realities. Human agency suggests that the process of self-reflection is a distinctly human core property of agency; moreover, the process of self-reflection is imbued with uncertainty. The social–cognitive literature suggests that humans seek relational coherence and meaning-ness, and strive to reduce uncertainty in their relational structures. Thus, it is suggested that the a.m. functions interact and support one another through relational frameworks such that a consistent and coherent life story can be created and maintained. Implications of this research are provided.

Livshistorier og førstegangspsykose — en klinisk metode for systematisk narrativt arbeid: Hvordan vurderer pasienten nytten av Kronologisk livsløpsdiagram (KLD) i utredning av førstegangspsykose?

Aim. To gain knowledge about first-episode psychosis patients’ experience with and judgements of a specific narrative method, as part of initial assessment. Background. Subjective illness insight is an important yet underfocused goal for psychosis treatment and should be aided as early as possible, even during assessments. No study, to our knowledge, has explored psychotic patients’ experience with specific clinical methods to promote insight. Methods. Psychosis is often associated with difficulties in telling coherent life stories. Chronological Lifespan Chart (CLC) is a means to systematically recreate parts of the patients’ subjective life story. Through semi-structured interviews, 19 patients were asked to describe and quantify the experienced value of using this narrative tool, with particular reference to recognition, participation and self-understanding. The study has a qualitative, phenomenological, and hermeneutic approach. Findings and conclusions. The patient-therapist cooperative work with CLC gave the majority of the patients a strong sense of being recognized, clearly encouraging the dialogue. They further experienced being active participants during initial assessments, and the felt ownership of their narratives increased. The patients’ self-understanding was strengthened by raising the consciousness about own coping strategies and consequences of the illness in daily life.

Trouble dissociatif de l’identité : un regard sur le rôle de la cohérence de l’histoire de vie

During the last several decades, many theories have tried to explain dissociative identity disorder (DID). Currently, the post-traumatic model (Davison, Blankstein, Flett, & Neale, 2008) is most commonly used by scientists to explain this disorder. The main hypothesis of this model states that a person who has endured multiple severe traumas in his or her childhood is more inclined to develop DID. However, this model does not answer a critical question: how can we explain why, of the many people who experience similar trauma, some develop DID and some do not? The present article suggests an alternate model, an integrative model of DID that combines the coherent life story hypothesis with the post-traumatic model. This new model suggests that because of genetic vulnerability, a person with an incoherent life story due to non-integration of traumatic events would develop DID.

Life story development in childhood: The development of life story abilities and the acquisition of cultural life scripts from late middle childhood to adolescence.

The authors investigated the relationship between the acquisition of cultural life scripts and the degree of coherence in children's and adolescents' life stories. Three groups of Danish school children aged 9 to 15 years participated. In 3 sessions, they wrote down a recently experienced single autobiographical event, their life story, and their cultural life script. Single-event and life stories were scored for coherence; life scripts were scored for normativity compared to an adult norm. Single-event stories and life stories were longer and more coherent in the older participants. Younger participants wrote significantly more coherent single-event stories than life stories. When controlling for age, single-event story coherence and global life story coherence did not correlate significantly, suggesting different developmental pathways. Life script normativity increased steadily across childhood and adolescence. Further, a significant relationship between the normativity of life scripts and the coherence of life stories, but not the coherence of single-event stories, was found.

Personality and the coherence of psychotherapy narratives

The stories people construct about themselves and their social worlds are key aspects of their identities [Bruner, J. S. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5, 100–122]. Whereas certain expected life experiences (e.g., leaving home, getting a job) may be relatively easy to narrate, more unexpected and difficult events, such as undergoing psychotherapy, may pose a challenge to successful narration. Yet it is especially important to successfully narrate one’s experience in psychotherapy in order to maintain the gains from treatment [Frank, J. D. (1961). Persuasion and healing: A comprehensive study of psychotherapy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press; Spence, D. P. (1982). Narrative truth and historical truth: Meaning and interpretation in psychoanalysis. New York: W.W. Norton]. The present study collected psychotherapy narratives from 76 adult former clients and coded them for the fundamental story criterion of coherence [Baerger, D. R., & McAdams, D. P. (1999). Life story coherence and its relation to psychological well-being. Narrative Inquiry, 9, 69–96]. Former clients that were high in trait Openness to experience and those at higher stages of ego development told more coherent stories about therapy. The relationship between ego development and narrative coherence remained significant even when controlling for Openness. The findings suggest that high ego development may provide narrators with the kind of sophisticated frameworks for meaning-making that are especially well-suited for the important task of making good sense of psychotherapy.

The Problem of Narrative Coherence

A growing number of psychological theorists, researchers, and therapists agree that people create meaningful selves through the individual and social construction of coherent life stories. But what is a coherent story? And are good life stories always coherent? This article addresses the problem of narrative coherence by considering the propositions that coherent life stories (1) provide convincing causal explanations for the self, (2) reflect the richness of lived experience, and (3) advance socially-valued living action. Like all stories, life stories exist to be told or performed in social contexts. Most criteria for coherence, therefore, reflect the culture within which the story is told and the life is lived.

THINKING OF SOMETHING TO SAY: PUBLIC AND PRIVATE NARRATIVES OF INFERTILITY

Autobiographical narratives of infertility are situated in both the private and public domains, particularly since the advent of assisted reproductive technology. Narratives of infertility told by 31 Australian women reveal that the tension between the public and the private is an uncomfortable one for the narrators. Infertile women must deal not only with the blow inflicted by infertility to their sense of self, but also with the difficulties of presenting a simple and coherent life story in the social world. The women expressed resentment at the public expectation that they should justify their desire to become mothers. Infertility support groups play a role in the construction and dissemination of a public narrative of infertility that is not pathological.

Life Story Coherence and its Relation to Psychological Well-Being

Over the past few years, the concept of coherence as it applies to people's storied accounts of their lives has become an increasingly popular topic. However, theories of coherence have been slow to appear, and a comprehensive definition of the construct has yet to be presented by researchers. Moreover, almost no work has been done relating the concept of coherence to the particular form of the life story. Thus, the aims of the present study were twofold: first, to investigate whether it is possible to construct a reliable coding scheme for life story coherence, and second, to examine the relationships between life story coherence and mental health. The results of the study indicate that the life story coherence coding system is a reliable measure, and that the coherence construct is therefore amenable to quantitative analysis. The most important finding of this study was that, as predicted, life story coherence demonstrated a statistically significant relationship to psychological well-being. This finding thus lends statistical credibility to the claims of narrative psychologists, who argue that mental well-being is related to, if not the result of, a well-integrated and coherent life story.

Bekeringsverhalen van vrouwen uit de charismatischevangelische beweging Een psychologische benadering1Dit artikel is een bewerking van het op 29 augustus 1997 te Amsterdam gehouden openbaar college ter gelegenheid van de opening van het academisch jaar 1997-1998 aan de Theologische Faculteit van de Universiteit van Amsterdam.

This article gives an example of a narrative approach to the study of conversion. Within a narrative psychology of religion, conversion can be understood as a self-narrative that is told as a coherent life story by adopting the communicative model of the ritual of conversion. According to Stromberg (1993), the conversion story allows the converts a kind of self-transformation by reframing their conflicts in the terms of a certain religious language. By analysing self-narratives of women who joined a charismatic women’s group (AGLOW), examples of the religious structure of a life story and of the possibilities of self-transformation are given.

Continuity and change: past experience as adaptive repertoire in occupational adaptation.

Narratives are gaining recognition as important ways occupational therapists and other clinicians can think about the life stories of clients. The purpose of this article is to examine a conceptualization of how changes from one chapter to another occur in life stories, using the metaphor of an adaptive repertoire, and to consider how this notion can be useful in helping clients maintain continuity and a coherent life story in times of change. Three premises based on the concept of adaptation address (a) configurations of occupational forms embedded in particular local worlds, (b) cumulative development of an adaptive repertoire that allows one to perform both competently and appropriately, and (c) adaptive transitions and application of one's repertoire to new circumstances. Implications for research and clinical practice in occupational therapy also are examined.