The function of narrative: Toward a narrative psychology of meaning Brian Schiff Department of Psychology The American University of Paris [e-mail]

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The function of narrative Toward a narrative
psychology of meaningBrian SchiffDepartment of
PsychologyThe American University of
Parisbschiff_at_aup.fr
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What is narrative? What is narrative psychology?

• Narrative is an elusive concept.
• The term is stretched and overextended.
• Psychology, like the other social sciences,
  appears to be content with an imprecise metaphor.
• As Hyvärinen (2006) argues, in the social
  sciences, the something else is, often, life.

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Why define the metaphor?

• The narrative metaphor should be sufficiently
  open to include a broad range of research and
  dissent.
• But, it should be specific enough such that
• We know what narrative is.
• Why we are doing narrative.
• It should direct us to innovative ways of
  understanding human lives.

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Is narrative a structure or a function?

• There is a tendency to understand narrative as a
  structural concept.
• The lines between what is narrative and not
  narrative are often fuzzy (Herman, 2009 Ryan,
  2007).
• To psychologists and others, who are interested
  in narrative because of the way that narratives
  are involved in how persons make sense of life,
  the issue of structure is secondary.

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Narrative functions

• The structural properties of narrative are
  important and complimentary.
• However, narrative is special because of the
  meanings that speech and other expressions are
  able to produce, create and inhabit.
• How narrating functions to manage meanings.
• Narrative is important because of what can be
  done or accomplished with narrative.

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Narrative is a verb

• Narrative is a dynamic process.
• Narrative should be thought of as a verb, to
  narrate or narrating, rather than the noun
  form narrative.
• Conceptual similarities with the related forms
  to tell, to show, and to make present.
• Narrating is an expressive event, unfolding in
  space and time.

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Describing narrative functions

• Categories are beginning points, which should
  serve as ways of thinking about narrating.
• As I see it, the primary function of narrating is
  to make present.
• Three ways of thinking about making present.
• Declarative. To give presence to subjective
  experience.
• Temporal. To give meaning to the past, present
  and future.
• Spatial (social). To co-create (shared and
  divergent) understandings of the world.

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Making present as showing

• Making present can be thought of as a variety of
  showing.
• Telling makes known.
• It is declarative.
• To give presence to.
• Telling objectifies our subjective experience and
  projects it into the world of social life.
• In making present, speakers are making claims
  about the reality of their experiences or
  knowledge.
• There is always a gap between what we know and
  experience and what we tell (Josselson, 2004).
• However, narrative is, arguably, the closest that
  we can get to experience and our understanding of
  experience.

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Making present in time and space

• Narrating is always making present at some
  specific time and place.
• In a very real sense, experience is made present
  here and now.
• Bakhtins (1981) concept of the chronotope.

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Locating narrating
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Making present in time

• Mark Freeman (2010) argues that one of the proper
  functions of narrative is reflecting on and
  making sense of the past.
• For Freeman, understanding is always from the
  perspective of the present, looking backward,
  what he calls hindsight.
• Hindsight is a kind of recuperative disclosure.
• It is, he writes, an agent (sic) of insight and
  rescue, recollection and recovery, serving to
  counteract the forces of oblivion (p. 44).
• He continues, a little later, Or, to put the
  matter more philosophically, it is a
  making-present of the world in its absence it is
  thus seen to provide a kind of supplement to
  ordinary experience, serving to draw out features
  of the world that would otherwise go unnoticed
  (emphasis added, p. 54).
• It is really, as Bert Cohler (1982) argues, a
  presently understood past.

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Making present (together) in space

• Other people are the most salient aspect of
  space.
• Making present in space implies locating
  ourselves in a given conversation.
• The imagery is one of being physically present in
  an ongoing scene of talk (Herman, 2009).
• A social performance (Bauman, 1986).
• In which we enter into and exit from
  conversational turns (Sacks, Schlegoff
  Jefferson, 1974).
• We gain our footing in the conversation at hand
  (Goffman, 1981).
• We position ourselves in relation to what is
  being said, to the others present and to larger
  identity discourses (Bamberg, 2004
  Georgakopoulou, 2007 Wortham, 2000, 2001).

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Making present (together) in space

• The ability to tell stories is first acquired
  through the childs participation in storytelling
  activities with others who are more expert
  (Fivush Nelson, 2006).
• There are sound theoretical and empirical reasons
  to argue that all narrations, even in adulthood,
  are co-narrations.
• The end result is to make present together joint
  understandings of self, others, the world, the
  past.
• However, co-telling doesnt lead necessarily to
  consensus.
• It can also be a vehicle for bringing forward and
  expressing competing versions of reality.

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What are the implications of this theoretical
analysis for narrative psychology?

• Narrative psychology should focus on the process
  of meaning making.
• How do persons (in time and space) make sense of
  life?
• In my opinion, this is what narrative research is
  all about.
• Narrative can grapple with meaning and do so in a
  way that is scientific, complex and grounded in
  expressions in time and in context.
• Further work on narrative functions should be
  grounded in actual observations of interviews and
  other conversations.
• Turning toward the concrete circumstances in
  which life experience is made present.
• Closely tying our observations to human lives.