ABSTRACT
The idea that identity has a narrative organization goes back to Erikson’s psychosocial theory of identity (Erikson 1959, 1968). According to Erikson, the past should be continuously reconstructed in the light of the present and the future. Even independently of the allure of postmodern narrative metatheories, this theory almost automatically entails the metaphor of narrative: essentially, identity is nothing else but a continuously reconstructed biography (Ricoeur 1991). Thus, a story that individuals construct about themselves will have a distinguished role from the point of view of the continuity, integrity and unity of their own self and from the aspect of other qualities of their identity. The intensive use of the narrative metaphor in self-psychology that began in the 1980s (Gergen and Gergen 1988; Mancuso and Sarbin 1983) raises several issues that have already been discussed in part in Chapter 3. These problems include, for example, the authorship of narrative, that is, the real identity of narrative substance and life story, the social construct of life story, the relationship between historical and psychological truth, the status of narrative structures in the autobiographical construct, the problem of who is the biography addressed to, the issue of monologicity and dialogicity in narrative, or the problem of how the story-like formulation of identity is related to other possible, for instance categorical formulations. Several of these questions have been discussed in Chapter 1 on the foundations of narrative psychology. Of course, the theory that self can be conceived of as a biography, a narrative is in accord with social constructionist metatheories which deny that self, or the things of the world are stable, secure starting points, so-called ‘essences’ (Bruner 1991). Ricoeur’s (1965) interpretation of psychoanalysis is a classic example of the psychological use of postmodern narrative theories, which sees the patient’s various manifestations not as symptoms of a biologically determined instinct dynamics but rather as a text that the analyst should interpret together with the patient. Joint text construction – therapy – results in a new, more coherent story.
