Psychology Degree Guide: Narrative Psychology

In her introductory book on the subject of narrative psychology, Michele L. Crossley defines the concept by quoting Stephen Crites: “A self without a story contracts into the thinness of its personal pronoun.” This best sums up the general assumption behind this exciting, and relatively new, branch of study. Narrative psychology started to congeal into a serious school during the 80s and 90s and has since found a number of practical applications, such as helping patients put their troubles into perspective during psychotherapy, and in assisting researchers find new approaches to old problems.

This page is a brief introduction to narrative psychology with links to authoritative, but accessible, resources on the subject. Articles by some of the top scholars in the field are interspersed throughout the sections below, as are websites that show some of the ways that the narrative approach to understanding people’s lives can be applied outside of the social sciences. A definition and concise history of this incipient field are also available, as are general resources that can lead researchers and students to more information.

Narrative Psychology Defined

In Introducing Narrative Psychology, Crossley explains that narrative psychology is the study of the “self” as an agent in some kind of story. Stories are understood to be a coping mechanism for hardship, including stress, illness, and the loss of a loved one, because they can situate overwhelming events in the context of a narrative, helping sufferers to make sense of their lives. Similarly, telling stories is a default means of providing solace. Someone fired from a job is likely to be consoled by friends and loved ones who tell of similar trials. Central to the study of narrative psychology is an understanding of “temporality,” writes Crossley, the tendency of human beings to order their lives in terms of events and activities that occur in chronological order rather than objects, themes, or some other measure.

Benedict Carey, in a summary of the discipline from the New York Times, adds that a person’s narratives have a major impact on their happiness. “Generative” people, who are passionate and pro-active, tend to focus on the positive “chapters” in their lives, which put the more trying moments into context. Others tend to focus on the single event, such as tripping over one’s words at a single point in an otherwise flawless speech, that interrupted the course of their personal narrative. This can lead to needless moodiness. Carey cites psychologist Dan P. McAdams, an expert on the subject whose faculty page at Northwestern University in Illinois makes much of his writing on the subject available for download. In particular, he states in Chapter 10 of The Meaning of Others: Narrative Studies of Relationships, that psychotherapy itself is a form of storytelling and that one of the main ways that therapists can help clients is by offering alternative life stories to the negative one conveyed by the patient.

History of Narrative Psychology

Narrative psychology is a fairly new discipline, although its roots go back to the turbulent origins of social psychology in the first half of the 20th century. Some of the seminal notions on the topic, for example, were pioneered by Henry Alexander Murray in Explorations in Personality, available in full from the Internet Archive, although this book did not solidify narrative psychology as a distinct field. Indeed, the discipline’s institutionalization did not begin until the mid-1980s and early 1990s when articles by Theodore R. Sarbin (such as Literary Pathfinding) and Jerome Bruner (The Narrative Construction of Reality) began to define the scope of narrative psychology’s research. Since then, the field has come into its own. As McAdams writes in Chapter 8 of Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research, narrative psychology has become an established school of thought since the turn of the 21st century, and articles about the personal stories of patients appear frequently in psychology journals today.

Applications of Narrative Psychology

Within the field of psychology itself, narratives can help experts understand the self, memory, cognitive development, trauma, and many other areas of interest. Professor Marie Tondreu of SUNY Empire State College provides an extensive bibliography that shows how the study of narratives can inform research in education, philosophy, literary theory, and many other disciplines outside of the social sciences. Indeed, narrative psychology is serious enough that DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has recently created a research initiative on storytelling, according to an article in Wired, in order to understand how narratives can influence people. The official description can be found on FedBizOpps.gov.

Additional Resources

• Narrative Psychology, a site by Kevin Murray, compiles full HTML texts of important articles on the subject between 1985 to 1992, when the field was first beginning to coalesce. Many of these articles are from Australian publications.
• Why Narrative Psychology Can’t Afford to Ignore the Body by Vincent W. Hevern of Le Moyne College envisions some major pitfalls in narrative psychology’s future without a more concerted effort to incorporate biological factors into its scope. For example, memory, an area of study under narrative psychologists’ domain, is heavily influenced by neurological variables. This article appeared in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology in 2008.
• The Dulwich Centre in Australia was founded in 1983 and seeks to support research and individual practice in narrative psychology and community service. The centre’s publications include various books about the subject of narrative psychology and the International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work.
• The Foley Center for the Study of Lives in Wisconsin is similar to the Australian group in that it promotes research, although the scope is somewhat broader than psychology. Nevertheless, a useful bibliography page compiles research papers from 2005 to the present, many of which are about narrative psychology, that are available for download.

Image is by Nicolas P. Rougier.