Narrative - what is it? Narrative sources and techniques

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June 12, 2019

1. What is it and where did it come from?
2. Differences between narrative and story
3. Narratives in history
4. In psychology and psychotherapy
5. In literature
6. In Yandex Zen
7. Brief summary

Hello, dear readers of the KtoNaNovenkogo.ru blog. Recently, the word “narrative” has become increasingly common on the Internet.

Here, for example, is a commentary on the voice-over of the video: “The picture is amazing, but the narrative is in trouble: expand your vocabulary!”

Even in Victor Pelevin’s new novel “The Lamp of Mufusail” this mysterious word is mentioned: “But here a serious problem of the veracity of the narrative arises.”

What does it mean? What is its origin? Let's figure out what “narrative” is and in what areas this term is used.

Narrative – what is it?

There are several versions about the origin of the term, or rather, several sources from which it could have appeared.

According to one of them, the name “narrative” originates from the words narrare and gnarus, which translated from Latin mean “knowing about something” and “expert”. The English language also has a word, narrative, which is similar in meaning and sound, which no less fully reflects the essence of the narrative concept. Today, narrative sources can be found in almost all scientific fields: psychology, sociology, philology, philosophy and even psychiatry. But for the study of such concepts as narrativity, narration, narrative techniques, and others, there is a separate independent direction - narratology. So, it’s worth understanding the narrative itself – what is it and what are its functions?

Both etymological sources proposed above carry a single meaning - the delivery of knowledge, a story. That is, to put it simply, a narrative is a kind of narration about something. However, this concept should not be confused with a simple story. Narrative storytelling has individual characteristics and characteristics, which led to the emergence of an independent term.

Subject of narrative psychotherapy

The subjects of narrative psychotherapy are thoughts of images, desires, personal experience, which is structured by harassment. In other words, listening to someone or reading someone's social blog, diary, page, the person who writes is a writing person. He creates a reality where there is part fact, part fiction, and everything goes to the fact that the person reading chooses what image his personal experience is realized in.

Let's say some event happened, a person asks another person. He begins to tell, and through his story, through his narration, through his narrative, the person asking reveals how this experience is structured.

Photo by Kate Kalvach on Unsplash

That is, first of all, we are talking about the text as a representation of experience, and not about the text as some kind of linguistic unit in the universe and other idealizations of textual meaning. And in order to feel and once again understand the essence of the narrative, there is a classic example, let’s look at it.

Narrative and story

How does a narrative differ from a simple story? A story is a method of communication, a way of receiving and transmitting factual (qualitative) information. A narrative is a so-called “explanatory story,” if we use the terminology of the American philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto (Danto A. Analytical Philosophy of History. M.: Idea-Press, 2002. P. 194).

That is, narrative is, rather, not an objective, but a subjective narrative. A narrative arises when subjective emotions and assessments of the narrator-narrator are added to an ordinary story. There is a need not only to convey information to the listener, but to impress, interest, force to listen, and evoke a certain reaction. In other words, the difference between a narrative and an ordinary story or narrative that states facts is in the involvement of the individual narrator’s assessments and emotions of each narrator. Or in indicating cause-and-effect relationships and the presence of logical chains between the events described, if we are talking about objective historical or scientific texts.

What problems does the narrative approach work with?

The narrative approach is used to work with people who have a variety of problems:

• Family problems. Problems of relationships in the family, between relatives or in relationships as a couple;
• Problems of an intrapersonal nature. Such problems include: low self-esteem, poor performance, doom, loss of meaning in life, feelings of guilt and shame, resentment;
• Organizational problems: problems with the team, building relationships in society or in the organization;
• Social problems. Here we can include relatively minor ones, such as problems with peers, and very serious ones, such as the rehabilitation of participants in natural disasters.

Narrative: example

In order to finally establish the essence of a narrative narrative, it is necessary to consider it in practice - in the text. So, narrative – what is it? An example demonstrating the differences between a narrative and a story, in this case, can be a comparison of the following passages: “Yesterday I got my feet wet. Today I didn’t go to work” and “Yesterday I got my feet wet, so I got sick today and didn’t go to work.” The content of these statements is almost identical. However, only one element changes the essence of the narrative - the attempt to connect both events. The first version of the statement is free from subjective ideas and cause-and-effect relationships, while in the second they are present and of key importance. In the original version, it was not indicated why the hero-narrator did not go to work; perhaps it was a day off, or he really did not feel well, but for a different reason. However, the second option reflects the subjective attitude to the message of a certain narrator, who, using his own considerations and referring to personal experience, analyzed the information and established cause-and-effect relationships, voicing them in his own retelling of the message. The psychological, “human” factor can completely change the meaning of the story if the context does not provide enough information.

Narratives in scientific texts

Nevertheless, not only contextual information, but also the perceiver’s (narrator’s) own experience influences the subjective assimilation of information, the introduction of evaluations and emotions. Based on this, the objectivity of the story is reduced, and one could assume that narrativity is not inherent in all texts, and, for example, it is absent in scientific messages. However, this is not quite true. To a greater or lesser extent, narrative features can be found in any message, since the text contains not only the author and the narrator, who in essence can be different characters, but also the reader or listener, who perceive and interpret the information received differently. First of all, of course, this concerns literary texts. However, scientific reports also contain narratives. They are present rather in historical, cultural and social contexts and are not an objective reflection of reality, but rather act as an indicator of their multidimensionality. However, they can also influence the formation of cause-and-effect relationships between historically reliable events or other facts.

Given such a variety of narratives and their abundant presence in texts of various contents, science could no longer ignore the phenomenon of narrativity and began to closely study it. Today, various scientific communities are interested in such a way of understanding the world as storytelling. It has development prospects in it, since the narrative allows us to systematize, organize, disseminate information, as well as individual humanitarian branches to study human nature.

Excerpt characterizing the Narrative

The officer looked at him and, without answering, turned back to the soldier: “I’ll go around them... Back!...” “Let me through, I’m telling you,” Prince Andrei repeated again, pursing his lips. - And who are you? - the officer suddenly turned to him with drunken fury. - Who are you? You (he especially emphasized on you) are the boss, or what? I'm the boss here, not you. “You go back,” he repeated, “I’ll smash you into a piece of cake.” The officer apparently liked this expression. “You shaved the adjutant seriously,” a voice was heard from behind. Prince Andrei saw that the officer was in that drunken fit of causeless rage in which people do not remember what they say. He saw that his intercession for the doctor’s wife in the wagon was filled with what he feared most in the world, what is called ridicule [ridiculous], but his instinct said something else. Before the officer had time to finish his last words, Prince Andrei, with a face disfigured from rage, rode up to him and raised his whip: “Please let me in!” The officer waved his hand and hurriedly drove away. “It’s all from them, from the staff, it’s all a mess,” he grumbled. - Do as you please. Prince Andrei hastily, without raising his eyes, rode away from the doctor's wife, who called him a savior, and, recalling with disgust the smallest details of this humiliating scene, galloped further to the village where, as he was told, the commander-in-chief was located. Having entered the village, he got off his horse and went to the first house with the intention of resting at least for a minute, eating something and bringing into clarity all these offensive thoughts that tormented him. “This is a crowd of scoundrels, not an army,” he thought, approaching the window of the first house, when a familiar voice called him by name. He looked back. Nesvitsky’s handsome face poked out from a small window. Nesvitsky, chewing something with his juicy mouth and waving his arms, called him to him. - Bolkonsky, Bolkonsky! Don't you hear, or what? “Go quickly,” he shouted. Entering the house, Prince Andrei saw Nesvitsky and another adjutant eating something. They hastily turned to Bolkonsky asking if he knew anything new. On their faces, so familiar to him, Prince Andrei read an expression of anxiety and concern. This expression was especially noticeable on Nesvitsky’s always laughing face. -Where is the commander-in-chief? – asked Bolkonsky. “Here, in that house,” answered the adjutant. - Well, is it true that there is peace and surrender? – asked Nesvitsky. - I'm asking you. I don’t know anything except that I got to you by force. - What about us, brother? Horror! “I’m sorry, brother, they laughed at Mak, but it’s even worse for us,” Nesvitsky said. - Well, sit down and eat something. “Now, prince, you won’t find any carts or anything, and your Peter, God knows where,” said another adjutant. -Where is the main apartment? – We’ll spend the night in Tsnaim. “And I loaded everything I needed onto two horses,” said Nesvitsky, “and they made me excellent packs.” At least escape through the Bohemian mountains. It's bad, brother. Are you really unwell, why are you shuddering like that? - Nesvitsky asked, noticing how Prince Andrei twitched, as if from touching a Leyden jar. “Nothing,” answered Prince Andrei. At that moment he remembered his recent clash with the doctor’s wife and the Furshtat officer. -What is the commander-in-chief doing here? - he asked. “I don’t understand anything,” said Nesvitsky. “All I understand is that everything is disgusting, disgusting and disgusting,” said Prince Andrei and went to the house where the commander-in-chief stood. Passing by Kutuzov's carriage, the tortured horses of the retinue and the Cossacks speaking loudly among themselves, Prince Andrei entered the entryway. Kutuzov himself, as Prince Andrei was told, was in the hut with Prince Bagration and Weyrother. Weyrother was an Austrian general who replaced the murdered Schmit. In the entryway little Kozlovsky was squatting in front of the clerk. The clerk on an inverted tub, turning up the cuffs of his uniform, hastily wrote. Kozlovsky’s face was exhausted - he, apparently, had not slept at night either. He looked at Prince Andrei and did not even nod his head to him. – Second line... Did you write it? - he continued, dictating to the clerk, - Kiev Grenadier, Podolsk... - You won’t have time, your honor, - the clerk answered disrespectfully and angrily, looking back at Kozlovsky. At that time, Kutuzov’s animatedly dissatisfied voice was heard from behind the door, interrupted by another, unfamiliar voice. By the sound of these voices, by the inattention with which Kozlovsky looked at him, by the irreverence of the exhausted clerk, by the fact that the clerk and Kozlovsky were sitting so close to the commander-in-chief on the floor near the tub, and by the fact that the Cossacks holding the horses laughed loudly under window of the house - from all this, Prince Andrei felt that something important and unfortunate was about to happen. Prince Andrei urgently turned to Kozlovsky with questions. “Now, prince,” said Kozlovsky. – Disposition to Bagration. -What about capitulation? - There is none; orders for battle have been made. Prince Andrei headed towards the door from behind which voices were heard. But just as he wanted to open the door, the voices in the room fell silent, the door opened of its own accord, and Kutuzov, with his aquiline nose on his plump face, appeared on the threshold. Prince Andrei stood directly opposite Kutuzov; but from the expression of the commander-in-chief’s only seeing eye it was clear that thought and concern occupied him so much that it seemed to obscure his vision. He looked directly at the face of his adjutant and did not recognize him. - Well, have you finished? – he turned to Kozlovsky. - Right this second, Your Excellency. Bagration, a short man with an oriental type of firm and motionless face, a dry, not yet old man, followed the commander-in-chief. “I have the honor to appear,” Prince Andrei repeated quite loudly, handing over the envelope. - Oh, from Vienna? Fine. After, after! Kutuzov went out with Bagration onto the porch. “Well, prince, goodbye,” he said to Bagration. - Christ is with you. I bless you for this great feat. Kutuzov's face suddenly softened, and tears appeared in his eyes. He pulled Bagration to him with his left hand, and with his right hand, on which there was a ring, apparently crossed him with a familiar gesture and offered him a plump cheek, instead of which Bagration kissed him on the neck. - Christ is with you! – Kutuzov repeated and walked up to the carriage. “Sit down with me,” he said to Bolkonsky. – Your Excellency, I would like to be useful here. Let me stay in the detachment of Prince Bagration. “Sit down,” said Kutuzov and, noticing that Bolkonsky was hesitating, “I need good officers myself, I need them myself.” They got into the carriage and drove in silence for several minutes. “There is still a lot ahead, there will be a lot of things,” he said with an senile expression of insight, as if he understood everything that was happening in Bolkonsky’s soul. “If one tenth of his detachment comes tomorrow, I will thank God,” added Kutuzov, as if speaking to himself. Prince Andrei looked at Kutuzov, and he involuntarily caught his eye, half an arshin away from him, the cleanly washed assemblies of the scar on Kutuzov’s temple, where the Izmail bullet pierced his head, and his leaking eye. “Yes, he has the right to talk so calmly about the death of these people!” thought Bolkonsky. “That’s why I ask you to send me to this detachment,” he said. Kutuzov did not answer. He seemed to have already forgotten what had been said to him and sat lost in thought. Five minutes later, smoothly rocking on the soft springs of the stroller, Kutuzov turned to Prince Andrei. There was no trace of excitement on his face. With subtle mockery, he asked Prince Andrei about the details of his meeting with the emperor, about the reviews he had heard at court about the Kremya affair, and about some common women he knew. Kutuzov, through his spy, received news on November 1 that put the army he commanded in an almost hopeless situation. The scout reported that the French in huge numbers, having crossed the Vienna bridge, headed towards Kutuzov’s route of communication with the troops coming from Russia. If Kutuzov had decided to stay in Krems, Napoleon’s army of one and a half thousand would have cut him off from all communications, surrounded his exhausted army of forty thousand, and he would have been in the position of Mack near Ulm. If Kutuzov had decided to leave the road that led to communications with troops from Russia, then he would have had to enter without a road into the unknown lands of the Bohemian

Discourse and narrative

From all of the above it follows that the structure of the narrative is ambiguous, its forms are unstable, there are no examples of them in principle, and depending on the context of the situation they are filled with individual content. Therefore, the context or discourse in which a particular narrative is embodied is an important part of its existence.

If we consider the meaning of the word in a broad sense, discourse is speech in principle, linguistic activity and its process. However, in this formulation, the term “discourse” is used to designate a certain context necessary when creating any text, such as a particular position of the existence of a narrative.

According to the concept of postmodernists, narrative is a discursive reality, which is revealed in it. The French literary theorist and postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard called narration one of the possible types of discourse. He sets out his ideas in detail in the monograph “The State of Modernity” (Lyotard Jean-François. The State of Postmodernity. St. Petersburg: Aletheia, 1998. - 160 pp.). Psychologists and philosophers Jens Brockmeyer and Rom Harre described narrative as a “subtype of discourse”; their concept can also be found in their research work (Jens Brockmeyer, Harre Rom. Narrative: problems and promises of one alternative paradigm // Questions of Philosophy. – 2000. – No. 3 – pp. 29-42.). Thus, it is obvious that in relation to linguistics and literary criticism, the concepts of “narrative” and “discourse” are inseparable from each other and exist in parallel.

Reviews and comments

If you have any questions, share them in the comments to this article. We will also be happy to accept your arguments in favor or against the narrative approach.

Author: Ekaterina Panikova

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Key words:1Psychoregulation

Narrative in philology

Much attention was paid to narrative and narrative techniques by philological sciences: linguistics, literary criticism. In linguistics, this term, as mentioned above, is studied together with the term “discourse”. In literary criticism, it refers rather to postmodern concepts. Scientists J. Brockmeyer and R. Harre in their treatise “Narrative: Problems and Promises of One Alternative Paradigm” proposed to understand it as a way of organizing knowledge and giving meaning to experience. In their opinion, narrative is instructions for composing stories. That is, a set of certain linguistic, psychological and cultural constructs, knowing which, you can compose an interesting story in which the mood and message of the narrator will be clearly guessed.

Narrative in literature is important for literary texts. Because a complex chain of interpretations is realized here, starting from the author’s point of view and ending with the perception of the reader/listener. When creating a text, the author puts into it certain information, which, after traveling a long text path and reaching the reader, can be completely modified or be interpreted differently. In order to correctly decipher the author's intentions, it is necessary to take into account the presence of other characters, the author himself and the author-narrator, who themselves are separate narrators and narrators, that is, tellers and perceivers. Perception becomes more complicated if the text is dramatic in nature, since drama is one of the types of literature. Then the interpretation is distorted even more, having passed through its presentation by the actor, who also brings his own emotional and psychological characteristics into the narrative.

However, it is precisely this ambiguity, the ability to fill a message with different meanings, to leave the reader food for thought, that is an important part of fiction.

Narrative psychology

Like most modern qualitative approaches, the narrative approach is quite young. It arose in the 1980s, and its methodological design is associated with the works of such authors as T. Sarbin, J. Bruner, E. Mishler, D. Polkinghorne. The main concept of the approach is narrative

, which means “story”, “narration”.
According to supporters of the narrative approach, people perceive the world around them, think, imagine, make choices in accordance with narrative structures
; to understand their own experience, they turn to the diverse stories existing in culture and the rules for constructing narratives, and with their help they build their life history and your identity.

Although the methodological development of the narrative approach occurred relatively recently, interest in stories about human life and empirical work with biographical materials has a rich history in psychology. In the psychoanalytic tradition, the importance of the stories a person tells for understanding the deep aspects of his personality was recognized by S. Freud. In working with patients' stories, Freud assumed that they somehow knew what had pathogenic meaning for them, although they could not talk about it. Freud believed that the patient should be brought to the memory of experiences that were repressed, and help him reconstruct a relatively complete picture of the forgotten years, and this picture should look plausible. In other words, the analyst, like an archaeologist, is engaged in the reconstruction of the past according to the traces it left behind. It is very important that Freud’s approach does not aim to verify the reconstructed past with facts; it is assumed that the reconstructed history is true not in a factual, but in a psychological sense - as the history of an experience that left a trace. Freud's distinction between “material” truth (the truth of facts) and “historical” truth (the truth of the nuclear experience behind the story, which can take various narrative forms)[2] was further developed by authors close to the narrative approach. In particular, D. Spence (Spence, 1982) suggests talking not even about “historical”, but about “personal” and “narrative” truth. According to Spence, narratives, with which the psychoanalyst deals, do not so much represent

, reflect the meaning of events, as much as
they create
this meaning from the chaos of lived experience. The “narrative” truth of clinical interpretation is that interpretation allows us to connect disparate fragments of experience into a coherent whole, to integrate painful and bizarre memories into a well-constructed, economical and meaningful story. It is quite possible, writes Spence, that the analyst offers only an illusion to the patient, but this illusion is supported by the respectability of the therapist and his analysis, and the conditional “truth” of an interpretation must be assessed by the therapeutic effect that it has.

In addition to Z. Freud, the works of A. Adler, who proposed the concepts of life style and life script, K.G., were of great importance for the formation and development of methods of working with biographical material. Jung, who emphasized the influence of archetypal plots and images on individual experiences and experiences, K. Bühler, who initiated life history research as the preferred method of personality research, as well as G. Allport, who turned to the narrative study of personal documents; in Russian psychology, research into the life path of an individual developed in the school of B.G. Ananyev (for a detailed history of biographical methods, see: Loginova, 2001; however, it is necessary to distinguish between biographical methods of research and personality correction, to which N.A. Loginova’s book is devoted, and the narrative approach in psychology, the proponents of which do not simply turn to biography to study psychological realities, but the latter also think in a certain way, assigning a special role to narrative structures and rules in their construction).

What is commonly called the “narrative turn” dates back to the mid-1980s - early 1990s, when a collection of articles edited by T. Sarbin “Narrative Psychology: The Told Story of Human Behavior” (Narrative Psychology..., 1986) was published. as well as the books by J. Bruner “Actual Consciousnesses, Possible Worlds” (Bruner, 1986) and “Actions of Meaning (Meaning and Operations with It)” (Bruner, 1990), E. Mishler “Research Interview: Context and Narrative” (Mishler, 1986), D. Polkinghorne “Narrative cognition and the humanities” (Polkinghorne, 1988). Narrative

is declared to be a new
basic metaphor
for psychology, replacing the metaphors of mechanism and organism.
Proponents of narrative psychology emphasize that events occurring in the world do not themselves have a narrative structure - it is human consciousness that gives them a special order, forming meaningful stories out of them. J. Bruner (1986) distinguishes between two modes of cognitive functioning that are not reducible to each other - rational-logical (paradigmatic) and narrative, each of which presupposes its own rules for ordering experience and constructing reality. D. Polkinghorne (1988) calls narrative a fundamental scheme
through which disparate actions and events are linked into a single whole, and external facts only partly determine the scheme of their possible organization; they can be ordered into different narratives, thereby receiving different meanings. In general, we can say that narrative is given a key role in human life and activity, it is declared the main cultural mechanism for constructing reality, and it is with it that the processes of meaning-making that are fundamental for humans are associated.

The narrative turn is part of the linguistic turn discussed above: proponents of narrative psychology also proceed from the assumption of the constitutive role of language, but they attach special importance to narrative structures - cultural rules for constructing stories and narrations. At the same time, some authors believe that the linguistic turn is only the source from which narrative psychology originates, which has now formed into a separate, very specific movement, in line with which such theoretical and methodological principles have developed that make it possible to build bridges between different directions psychology, thereby facilitating its integration. And if discursive psychology is often called the second cognitive revolution

, then narrative psychology can be considered
the third cognitive revolution
(Hiles, Čermák, 2008).

The ideas of the narrative approach formed the basis of numerous psychological studies of social and personal identity, for example, the studies of D. McAdams, in whose works identity is considered in narrative coordinates - as a life story, by constructing which a person connects his past, present and future and provides himself with a certain degree of unity and purposefulness (about the concept and empirical research of D. McAdams, see: Barsky, Gritsuk, 2008). Cognitive processes, individual and collective memory (especially many works devoted to autobiographical memory), and emotions are also explored in a narrative vein. The narrative approach has become in demand in clinical studies of illness experience and medical practices. Finally, it should be especially noted that in the field of counseling psychology and psychotherapy, the development of narrative ideas led to the creation of a new psychotherapeutic direction - narrative psychotherapy (White, 2010; Friedman and Combs, 2001).

The philosophical and methodological foundations of the narrative approach appear to be rooted in two powerful traditions: social constructionism and phenomenology. Social constructionist implications can be traced, for example, in the ideas of narrative psychologists about the active construction of individual and social experience, versions of reality, self-structures and identity, which is accomplished through the use of certain cultural templates, schemes, and “master narratives.” Great attention is paid to the sociocultural (discursive) environment (context) in which the story is told, and the forms of inclusion in it. At the same time, narrative psychologists, turning to stories, are often aimed at reconstruction, recreating the features of the storyteller’s life world, his living experiences and experiences - i.e. the work they do is close to what a phenomenologist does. As D. Hiles and I. Čermák rightly emphasize (Hiles, Čermák, 2008), narrative research combines a methodological perspective centered on the analysis of situationally determined speech action embedded in the social context, and a view of a person as a subject actively comprehending and rethinking his experience. This implies the need for a narrative psychologist to take into account two types of context - the social/cultural context (both the immediate interaction within which the story is carried out, and the broader social space) and the context of “history as a whole,” reflecting the integrity of the “inner world” of the individual.

The techniques used in narrative research are very diverse. E. Mishler emphasizes that there is no such thing as “the only or best way to study narrative”: in developing their own approach, narrative psychologists must be attentive to what has been developed in other approaches and ask themselves the question of what they can learn from them (Mishler, 1995). Representatives of narrative psychology actively turn to methods of narrative analysis developed in linguistics, semiotics, and literary studies (ideas and models of V.Ya. Propp, A.-J. Greimas, C. Bremont, Ts. Todorov, R. Barth, etc.). In narrative studies of the last decade, methods and techniques characteristic of the psychoanalytic (psychodynamic) tradition, as well as approaches of social criticism, are often used. Many modern works of supporters of the narrative approach are based on a combination of techniques drawn from various traditions of text analysis - hermeneutic, structuralist, psychoanalytic, critical. Attention should also be paid to the fact that in a number of works by narrative psychologists there is a noticeable shift towards formalization of analysis, for example, in life history studies conducted by D. McAdams and colleagues, generalized lists of coding categories are proposed, the use of which allows you to largely structure analysis and, if necessary, quantify data.

Narrative psychologists use any stories as data (including stories from psychotherapy clients). narrative interview method can also be used to collect data.

, which is a free conversation initiated by the interviewer. The interview may concern the entire life path of a person (biographical interview: “Tell me about your life... when and where were you born...?”), or it may be aimed at collecting material about some specific events or certain aspects of life (thematic or subject-focused interview: “How did you come to psychology? Tell us how it happened”, “Do you remember the time when you went to school? Tell us how it was”). Narrative psychologists view the interview as a speech event, during which the same meaning-making activity continues as people do in their everyday lives. People's stories are usually recorded on a voice recorder and then transcribed verbatim, but without using a special transcription system, which is adopted, for example, in discourse analytical research and the conversation analysis approach. It is allowed to translate oral speech into a more correct literary form.

The analysis of the stories, as already noted, is very diverse. Transcripts, as a rule, are divided into thematic units - sequences of episodes, events, etc. Each episode is relatively complete in terms of meaning and plays a certain role in the overall “movement” of the story. Transcript analysis includes content analysis and story form analysis. The plot can be analyzed separately

(the primary sequence of events) and
plot
(the form of story in which the sequence of events is clothed).
Often, when conducting narrative analysis, coding and categorization techniques are used, followed by the identification of main themes. It is necessary to reconstruct what can be designated as a nuclear narrative
- the main meaning-forming theme of the story that links the entire text together. In addition, other - side, peripheral, additional - topics are studied separately, marked by categories derived from the text as a result of open coding. The most important part of narrative research is the analysis of form. The type of narrative, the features of its “movement” and coherence are monitored. In the process of analyzing the type of narrative, the narrative typology of the Canadian literary critic N. Fry is most often used, who identified romance, comedy, tragedy and satire - narrative structures containing the idea of ​​​​maintaining social order (romance), its destruction/change (comedy), the experience of its loss/loss (tragedy) and acts of cynical defiance towards him (satire). By the nature of its “movement”, a narrative can be progressive, regressive and stable, or it can combine elements of various types of “movement”, depending on the topic, time stage, etc. A good addition to the substantive and formal analysis of a narrative can be the use of techniques characteristic for critical discourse analysis - tracking the forms of positioning of the hero of the story in relation to certain people, social environment, etc. and an analysis of the types of “moral order” implied by such positioning (Emerson & Frosh, 2004).

Conclusion

Summing up our review of the main approaches to the analysis of discourse, language and narrative, let us once again draw attention to a number of the most important ideas for psychotherapy that they contain. Firstly, these approaches significantly undermine the narrow psychologism in understanding problems; they shift the focus from phenomena traditionally understood as purely psychological to interpersonal processes and sociocultural sources of meaning. Secondly, the analyzed approaches call into question the usual ways of thinking for psychologists, in which traditional psychological concepts are uncritically associated with supposedly objectively existing mental realities that are described by these concepts; According to the approaches considered, psychological concepts are only a certain way to interpret reality; they are constructed in a specific cultural and historical context and are local in nature. Finally, thirdly, the described approaches lead to the need for a thorough study (and offer appropriate methodological tools for this) of the influence that established systems of meaning and dominant discursive practices have on individuals; By deconstructing what seems familiar and taken for granted, analysts of discourse, conversation and narrative contribute to the possibility of the birth of other meanings and alternative forms of understanding - both at the level of the professional community and at the level of life self-determination of an individual.

So far, in our opinion, approaches to the analysis of discourse, conversation and narrative have not been sufficiently assimilated into psychotherapy research. It must be said that the pronounced sociocritical pathos inherent in these approaches runs counter to both the objectivist orientations of academic psychologists and the humanistic ideology of consulting psychologists. However, it seems to us that their broader and more consistent assimilation will open up new perspectives both in the study of interactive processes occurring within psychotherapeutic sessions, and in the understanding of psychotherapy as a special institution related to the construction and regulation of subjectivity in the context of social practices of power and dominance - with on the one hand, and in the context of possible practices of freedom, on the other.

Literature

1. Barsky F.I., Gritsuk A.G. “Life story interview” by D. McAdams as a method for studying narrative identity // Psychological diagnostics. – 2008. – No. 5. – P. 3-48

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About the author

Busygina Natalia Petrovna

– Candidate of Psychological Sciences, Associate Professor; Associate Professor of the Department of Individual and Group Psychotherapy, Faculty of Consultative and Clinical Psychology, Moscow State University of Psychology and Education, Associate Professor of the Department of Psychological Counseling, Faculty of Psychology, Moscow State University.

Research interests: qualitative methodology, qualitative methods, counseling psychology, psychoanalysis, personality research in postmodern conditions.

[email protected]

Boussyguina Natalia

– Ph.D. in Psychology, Associate Professor, Counseling and Clinical Psychology Department, Moscow State University of Psychology and Education; Associate Professor, Psychology Department, Moscow State Regional University.

Research interests: qualitative methodology, qualitative methods, counseling psychology, psychoanalysis, studies of personality under the conditions of postmodernity.

[email protected]

[1] It should be said that the term “critical psychology” initially arose at the turn of the 60-70s in Germany. He designated the direction of Marxist-oriented psychology (K. Holzkamp, ​​W. Holzkamp-Osterkamp, ​​P. Cuyler, K.H. Brown, etc.). This direction has not received widespread development outside of Germany. So we can say that at the end of the twentieth century, critical psychology is born again - now in the context of English-language psychology. Today, the German critical psychology of K. Holzkamp is considered as one of the sources of the modern, broader direction of critical psychology (see, for example, Parker, 1999).

[2] The distinction between “material” and “historical” truth is most clearly presented in Freud’s late work “Moses and the Monotheistic Religion,” but this idea also appears in his other works (“The Future of an Illusion,” “On Making Fire”). History becomes true (acquires “historical” truth) due to the revival of an event-experience that has disappeared from the memory of a person (or all of humanity); it “grabs” the truth of the event in an allegorical, symbolic and emotionally rich form. In this sense, the story of Oedipus is one of the possible forms of “grasping” the “historical” truth of that complex of experiences that is associated with relationships in the parental family and the formation of psychological gender.

Narrative method in psychology and psychiatry

The term “narrative psychology” belongs to the American cognitive psychologist and educator Jerome Bruner. He and the forensic psychologist Theodore Sarbin can rightfully be considered the founders of this humanitarian field.

According to the theory of J. Bruner, life is a series of narratives and subjective perceptions of certain stories, the purpose of the narrative is to subjectivize the world. T. Sarbin is of the opinion that narratives combine facts and fiction that define the experience of a particular person.

The essence of the narrative method in psychology is recognizing a person and his deep-seated problems and fears through the analysis of his stories about them and their own life. Narratives are inseparable from society and cultural context, since this is where they are formed. Narrative in psychology has two practical meanings for the individual: firstly, it opens up opportunities for self-identification and self-knowledge through the creation, comprehension and speaking of various stories, and secondly, it is a way of self-presentation, thanks to such a story about oneself.

Psychotherapy also uses a narrative approach. It was developed by Australian psychologist Michael White and New Zealand psychotherapist David Epston. Its essence is to create certain circumstances around the person being treated (client), the basis for creating his own story, involving certain people and performing certain actions. And if narrative psychology is considered more of a theoretical branch, then in psychotherapy the narrative approach already demonstrates its practical application.

Thus, it is obvious that the narrative concept has been successfully used in almost any field that studies human nature.

What are the differences between the narrative approach and others?

At the beginning of the article it was said that narrative psychotherapy has detractors who have an extremely negative attitude towards the methods of this practice. In order not to be unfounded, it is worth citing several differences between the narrative approach and others, which are considered quite radical. That is why it is not surprising that this approach has opponents.

So, what are the differences between the narrative approach and other psychotherapeutic techniques:

1. To begin with, we should note the relationship of classical psychology and the narrative approach to the human unconscious. If we adhere to classical practice, it is believed that the unconscious is something like the “soul” - human consciousness, where the problem lies. Narrative practice considers the unconscious as a concentration of life experiences and impressions received throughout life. Thus, it is not an abstract understanding of this issue that stands out, but a rather specific designation. It is the unconscious that contains the answers to many questions, and a person will need help to reach them;
2. The difference regarding the relationship of the narrative practitioner to his patient seems quite interesting. If in classical psychotherapy, a specialist initially treats a person who comes to him as a patient, then a narrative practitioner considers the patient to be practically healthy. Of course, with his problems - hysterics, depression, nervous breakdowns, but overall healthy. Such a friendly attitude has a positive effect on the patient’s condition - he immediately begins to feel lighter and more confident;
3. Conventional psychology focuses primarily on human sensations. The narrative method is based on the patient's actions. The narrative allows you to identify a person’s interests and then follow actions that can lead him to get rid of existing problems. The specialist strives to rewrite the patient’s history so that he becomes more confident in his own abilities and happier.

Narrative in politics

There is also an understanding of narrative in political activity. However, the term “political narrative” carries more negative connotations than positive ones. In diplomacy, narrative is understood as deliberate deception, concealment of true intentions. A narrative story involves deliberately concealing certain facts and true intentions, possibly substituting a thesis and using euphemisms to make the text sound and avoid specifics. As mentioned above, the difference between a narrative and an ordinary story is the desire to make someone listen, to make an impression, which is typical for the speech of modern politicians.

Visualization of the narrative

As for the visualization of narratives, this is a rather complex issue. According to some scientists, for example, the theorist and practitioner of narrative psychology J. Bruner, visual narrative is not a reality clothed in textual form, but structured and ordered speech within the narrator. He called this process a certain way of constructing and establishing reality. Indeed, it is not the “literal” linguistic shell that forms the narrative, but a consistently presented and logically correct text. Thus, you can visualize a narrative by voicing it: telling it orally or writing it in the form of a structured text message.

WHAT IS WRITTEN IN THE DICTIONARY

(Lat. narrare - linguistic act, that is, verbal presentation, as opposed to presentation.) Storytelling, retelling, indirect speaking; in psychotherapy - patient stories about personal history. (Dictionary of psychological terms)

Narration in the form of an oral story in all its diversity of manifestations: incidents from life, scary and funny stories, family legends, stories about acquaintances and celebrities, stories about inexplicable incidents, retellings and interpretations of dreams, miracles, rumors, rumors and even gossip. (Training dictionary of advertising and public relations terms)

A concept that captures the way of being of a narrative text, in which consciousness and language, being and time, man and the world are closely interconnected. (Encyclopedia of Epistemology and Philosophy of Science)