ABSTRACT

The chapter presents narrative psychology as an important chapter of cultural psychology. The narrative attitude interprets human events in an anthropomorphic way, as a sequence of intentional actions performed by human agents. The chapter first presents two traditions that are historical sources of present day narrative research in psychology. In the 1930s, Frederick Bartlett, the British experimental psychologist, initiated a research tradition looking for schematization in human story recall. Around the same time, dating from the 1920s, the Russian folklorist, Vladimir Propp started the ethnographic study of folk tales, showing repetitive roles and functions in them. These two traditions had been integrated in cognitive memory research from the 1960s on, showing that the key for schematization was the reconstruction of the intentional action plan of the heroes. Contemporary approaches to narrative psychology went beyond narrative memory schematization. Following the theories of Dennett and Ricoeur, they treat narrative organization as being crucial to our personal identity. I also consider the proposal of Bruner about a duality of human approaches to the world, a duality of paradigmatic, depersonalized, and narrative, personalized approaches. Narrative psychology is interpreted as a basic constitutive chapter of cultural psychology, both because it presents narrative patterns as central components of culture, and because of its intimate ties to the issue of self, a core problem of all cultural psychology endeavors.