ABSTRACT
For Jerome Bruner (2004), narrative expression is a self-making practice – narrative and self are inextricably interlinked. For Bruner, the sense of self originates in the embodied act of storying our experiences in the world in order to share those experiences with others as well as to facilitate selfunderstanding. In terms of self-understanding, he suggests that telling oneself about oneself is like making up a story about whom and what we are, what’s happened and why we are doing what we are doing. The construction of selfhood, for Bruner, cannot proceed without a capacity to narrate. Once we are equipped with that capacity, we can produce a selfhood that joins us with others, that permits us to hark back selectively to our past while shaping ourselves for the possibilities of an imagined future.
