The function of narrative: Toward a
narrative psychology of meaning
Brian Schiff
Department of Psychology
The American University of Paris
bschiff@aup.fr
What is narrative?
What is narrative psychology?
• “Narrative” is an elusive concept.
• The term is stretched and overextended.
• Psychology, like the other social sciences,
appears to be content with an imprecise
metaphor.
• As Hyvärinen (2006) argues, in the social
sciences, the something else is, often, life.
Why define the metaphor?
• The narrative metaphor should be sufficiently
open to include a broad range of research and
dissent.
• But, it should be specific enough such that:
• We know what narrative is.
• Why we are doing narrative.
• It should direct us to innovative ways of
understanding human lives.
Is narrative a structure or a function?
• There is a tendency to understand narrative as a
structural concept.
• The lines between what is narrative and not
narrative are often fuzzy (Herman, 2009; Ryan,
2007).
• To psychologists and others, who are interested
in narrative because of the way that narratives
are involved in how persons make sense of life,
the issue of structure is secondary.
Narrative functions
• The structural properties of narrative are
important and complimentary.
• However, narrative is special because of the
meanings that speech and other expressions
are able to produce, create and inhabit.
• How narrating functions to manage meanings.
• Narrative is important because of what can be
done or accomplished with narrative.
Narrative is a verb
• Narrative is a dynamic process.
• Narrative should be thought of as a verb, to
“narrate” or “narrating”, rather than the noun
form “narrative.”
• Conceptual similarities with the related forms
“to tell,” “to show,” and “to make present.”
• Narrating is an expressive event, unfolding in
space and time.
Describing narrative functions
• Categories are beginning points, which should serve as
ways of thinking about narrating.
• As I see it, the primary function of narrating is to “make
present.”
• Three ways of thinking about making present.
1. Declarative. To give presence to subjective experience.
2. Temporal. To give meaning to the past, present and
future.
3. Spatial (social). To co-create (shared and divergent)
understandings of the world.
Making present as “showing”
•
•
•
•
•
Making present can be thought of as a variety of showing.
Telling makes known.
It is declarative.
“To give presence to.”
Telling objectifies our subjective experience and projects it
into the world of social life.
• In making present, speakers are making claims about the
reality of their experiences or knowledge.
• There is always a gap between what we know and
experience and what we tell (Josselson, 2004).
• However, narrative is, arguably, the closest that we can get
to experience and our understanding of experience.
Making present in time and space
• Narrating is always making present at some
specific time and place.
• In a very real sense, experience is made
present here and now.
• Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of the chronotope.
Locating narrating
Source: Page 80.
Young, K. (2004). Frame and boundary in the phenomenology of narrative. In M. Ryan (Ed.) Narrative
across the media: The languages of storytelling (pp. 76-107). Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska
Press.
Making present in time
• Mark Freeman (2010) argues that one of the proper functions of
narrative is reflecting on and making sense of the past.
• For Freeman, understanding is always from the perspective of the
present, looking backward, what he calls hindsight.
• Hindsight is a kind of “recuperative disclosure.”
• It is, he writes, an “agent (sic) of insight and rescue, recollection and
recovery, serving to counteract the forces of oblivion (p. 44).”
• He continues, a little later, “Or, to put the matter more
philosophically, it is a making-present of the world in its absence; it
is thus seen to provide a kind of ‘supplement’ to ordinary
experience, serving to draw out features of the world that would
otherwise go unnoticed (emphasis added, p. 54).”
• It is really, as Bert Cohler (1982) argues, a “presently understood
past.”
Making present (together) in space
• Other people are the most salient aspect of space.
• Making present in space implies locating ourselves in a given
conversation.
• The imagery is one of being physically present in an ongoing “scene
of talk” (Herman, 2009).
• A social performance (Bauman, 1986).
• In which we enter into and exit from conversational turns (Sacks,
Schlegoff & Jefferson, 1974).
• We gain our “footing” in the conversation at hand (Goffman, 1981).
• We “position” ourselves in relation to what is being said, to the
others present and to larger identity discourses (Bamberg, 2004;
Georgakopoulou, 2007; Wortham, 2000, 2001).
Making present (together) in space
• The ability to tell stories is first acquired through the
child’s participation in storytelling activities with others
who are more expert (Fivush & Nelson, 2006).
• There are sound theoretical and empirical reasons to
argue that all narrations, even in adulthood, are conarrations.
• The end result is to make present together joint
understandings of self, others, the world, the past.
• However, co-telling doesn’t lead necessarily to
consensus.
• It can also be a vehicle for bringing forward and
expressing competing versions of reality.
What are the implications of this theoretical
analysis for narrative psychology?
• Narrative psychology should focus on the process of
meaning making.
• How do persons (in time and space) make sense of life?
• In my opinion, this is what narrative research is all about.
• Narrative can grapple with meaning and do so in a way that
is scientific, complex and grounded in expressions in time
and in context.
• Further work on narrative functions should be grounded in
actual observations of interviews and other conversations.
• Turning toward the concrete circumstances in which life
experience is made present.
• Closely tying our observations to human lives.