ABSTRACT
Academic historians are well aware that historical accounts are influenced by the particular interests and motives of the writer within a socio-cultural context. The importance of narrative in human cognition was proposed by Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, arguing that the subject of psychology is essentially social. This does not deny the importance of human biology but argues that the phenomenon under study within psychology is socio-cultural. Each social interaction is a fragment of an unfolding narrative of a person's life that may follow a familiar story line but that is dynamic and changeable. The development of the self takes place over time and in the context of the experiences and relationships in everyday social life. The model of everyday folk psychology is not an underlying rational and logical theory, but about social life and social interaction, concerned with doing. In social psychology, the analysis of discourse has been presented as a challenge to a positivistic and mentalist approach to psychology.
