Journal of Narrative and Life History - Volume 5, Issue 3, 1995

AbstractFrom a narrative perspective, I suggest restructuring our understanding of the phenomena of emotions by broadening the conception of emotions to emotional life. I make the claim that emotional life is storied; further, that metaphors drawn from the discipline of rhetoric are indispensable to an understanding of emotional life. I make use of the distinction between dramaturgical rhetoric and dramatistic rhetoric to identify the rhetorical acts in which the actor is the author of a concurrent script (dramaturgical) from those for which the author-ship is located in cultural narratives (dramatistic). In conceptualizing emotional life as arising from patterned efforts to resolve moral issues, I turn to role theory to fashion a construction-moral identity roles-as parallel to, but not the same as, social-identity roles. (Social Psychology)

AbstractFrom a social-constructionist standpoint, emotional expressions are constitu-ents of lived narratives, and gain their meaning from their position within these narratives. These special forms of narrative, termed emotional scenarios, are themselves lodged within a broader cultural and historical landscape. This article compares major features of romantic love scenarios as they have changed from 19th century romanticist culture, through 20th century modern-ism, and into the contemporary postmodern context. We identify major ways in which the individual participant in romantic scenarios may identify the self, gender variations in performance, the character of sequencing in the scenario, and the vocabulary of emotional expression as these have evolved over the past century. Such transformations allow enormous freedom of expression to the contemporary "romantic," but also result in simultaneous loss in both the sense of authenticity and security. (Social Psychology)

AbstractThis essay examines the conditions surrounding emotional blindness, indiffer-ence, or the syndrome that is known clinically as alexithymia. Indifference to events or circumstances is related to the narrative construction of those events, is selective within the same person, and is dependent upon a person's con-structed identity. Our capacity to story ourselves and the world about us removes our indifference. A clinical case of alexithymia and several biographical examples are employed to illustrate and fortify these points. (Social and Clinical Psychology)Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands.William James, 1900, p. 264

AbstractMultiple personality disorder (MPD) challenges clinical psychology to forego the assumption of a unified and essential self. This is part of a larger historical process of giving up verities of the modern period as we move into an as-yet-unshaped postmodern age. Three arguments are made about this challenge: (a) Multiplicity becomes intelligible within a theoretical framework of narrative psychology; (b) This intelligibility makes inescapable what has been suspected by post-modern thought for some time-that the self (unitary or multiple) is a social construction and not an essence; and (c) the processes of both diagnosing and treating MPD also are best understood as social constructions. (Clini-cal Psychology)

AbstractThe articles presented in this special issue have located emotional responses within more complex narratives dictated by both individual histories and the larger sociocultural context. A major thesis running through these articles is that the study of emotion as a physiological response in the laboratory loses sight of the meanings expressed by emotions in interpersonal and social trans-actions. A deeper understanding of anger, love, and even boredom can be reached by looking at how these aspects of emotional life are expressed in narrative scenarios that involve the adopting of roles, the sharing of expecta-tions, and the stipulation of particular actions. Finally, contextual perspectives challenge researchers to scrutinize and bring to light the narrative expectations their own studies create for the participants involved. (Personality Psychology)

AbstractThe articles in this special issue indicate that the self is best understood not as an empirical and transhistorical entity, but as a narrative, inextricable from its location in history and culture. This view has significant implications for psy-chotherapy. It suggests that therapy is a moral discourse, that its claim to authority is better understood as ideological than as scientific. But because it generally takes a reificationist stance on such matters as emotions, therapy is currently ill-equipped to take account of the self as a social construction and of itself as a moral practice. (Clinical Psychology)