Life and Story: Autobiographies for a Narrative Psychology

Narrative psychology proceeds from the assumption that understanding human experience and behavior necessarily involves reviewing the relevant historical and cultural contexts in which they occur. This book is an argument for and example of narrative psychology. It contains an autobiographical essay by Theodore Sarbin, a duography by Mary and Kenneth Gergen, and a teleography by George Howard, and nine other life stories by people whose scholarship has reflected a contextualist or narrative root metaphor. Psychologists will find these essays useful to the interpretation of contemporary theories and research focused on narrative, scripts, and discourse processing. This anthology will also be interesting to students of autobiographical memory and biography because of the conscious reflexivity expressed in the essays and comments by each of the contributors on the effects of writing one’s life story.

D. JOHN LEE is Associate Professor of Psychology at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is the editor of Storying Ourselves: A Narrative Perspective on Christians in Psychology (1993) and a coeditor of Ethnic Minorities and Evangelical Christian Colleges (1991).