Transcript Two Routes to Influence

Narrative Identity …
…at the Crossroads of Hermeneutic
Philosophy and Cognitive Psychology
Ray Sparrowe
Framing the conversation



A narrative about narrative identity – or,
how I stumbled into this arena
Where I find myself now
Where to go from here?
– Go forward, or set aside
– If forward …



Directions for further constructive theory?
Links to other lines of research?
Potential empirical work?
The story illustrated
Hermeneutic
Philosophy
The Narrative
Self
Authentic
Leadership?
Authentic
Self?
Self?
Convergence?
Cognitive
Psychology
Autobiographical
Memory
A narrative about narrative …

Authentic
Leadership?
What is Authentic Leadership?
– “To thine own self be true”
– Speaking one’s own true voice
(Kouzes and Posner)
– Finding one’s inner purpose
(George)
Authentic
Self?

So, the authentic self …
– Is discovered through self
awareness
– Stands over against the influence
of others
– Endures as a touchstone for
consistency
But …. (my hunches)



Does self-awareness faithfully
disclose our true selves – or is
self-awareness motivated?
(Think Freud here)
Are our true selves constituted
apart from others, or through
relationships with others?
(Recall who Jesus met in the
wilderness)
Is consistency all it’s cracked up
to be, or is there virtue in flipflopping?
Authentic
Leadership?
Authentic
Self?
Self?
Take 1:
The Narrative Self
Hermeneutic
Philosophy
The Narrative
Self
Self?

Paul Ricoeur
– Heir apparent in the tradition of Dilthey, Husserl,
Heidegger and Gadamer
– Emphasis on the interpretation of ‘texts’ – symbols
(1967), metaphor (1977), and narrative (1984; 1985;
1988)



But uneasy within the interpretative paradigm (Burrell and
Morgan)
Leans towards social constructivism (Gergen, 1985), but
wants to recover the objective in the subjective
Sensemaking: More like Weick
Narrative in
Ricoeur’s Thought
Hermeneutic
Philosophy
The Narrative
Self
Self?

Emplotment (the narrative engine)
– “draws a meaningful story from a diversity of events or
incidents” (1984, p. 65)
– “brings together factors as heterogeneous as agents,
goals, means, interactions, circumstances, and
unexpected results” (1984, p. 65)
– “To understand the story is to understand how and
why the successive episodes led to this conclusion,
which, far from being foreseeable, must finally be
acceptable, as congruent with the episodes brought
together by the story” (1984, p. 66-67).
– “Discordant Concordance”
Hermeneutic
Philosophy
The Narrative
Self
The Narrative Self
Self?

Emplotment Unifies discordant events…
– Weaves together discordant events into a cohesive
narrative
– Intertwines the character and the plot thereby lending
self-constancy to an individual’s identity in relation to
the temporal totality of an implied beginning, middle,
and end

…thereby disclosing character through the plot
Hermeneutic
Philosophy
The Narrative
Self
The Narrative Self
Self?

Emplotment unifies discordant events and
experiences …
– What Ricoeur calls “imaginative variation”
– Actual, counter-factual, and hypothetical
– we ‘make sense’ of events by figuring them into brief
plots – often with implied or actual actors, intentions,
and outcomes.
– These brief plots are then retrospectively figured into
larger narratives where there is an implied or actual
beginning, middle, and ending.
Hermeneutic
Philosophy
The Narrative
Self
The Narrative Self
Self?

But where do these imaginative variations come
from?
– Literature represents a “vast laboratory for thought
experiments” (1992, p. 148)
– Providing story lines (short plots and episodes) for
entertaining alternative pasts, presents, and futures

And so, by extension, imaginative variations
come from others all around us (e.g. culture)
Hermeneutic
Philosophy
The Narrative
Self
The Narrative Self
Self?

The Narrative Self is constituted in relation to
others … “Oneself as Another” in two ways …
– Others as sources for plot lines and selves roviding
story lines (short plots and episodes) for entertaining
alternative pasts, presents, and futures

Much like Markus’s possible selves or Ibarra’s provisional
selves
– In narrating the self, we represent ourselves as
‘another’ who is the ‘object’ of our subjective narration

Connections to Mead, Cooley, and Berger and Luckmann
The Narrative Self
….. So ….
Hermeneutic
Philosophy
The Narrative
Self
Self?

The self is a narrative interpretation, where
disparate events and imaginative variation
illuminate character and identity
– Rather than a prototype-matching process


Authenticity is not flight from others, but
emergent from interpretation of self in relation to
others and oneself as another
Authenticity is not being true to one’s self, but
the esteem one holds for others and the regard
others hold for us
Take 2: Time Travel
(Autobiographical Memory)

What do you remember of …
–
–
–
–

Your
Your
Your
Your
second day of high school?
first day in college?
second publication?
first publication?
… the day of the 9/11 attacks?
Self?
Cognitive
Psychology
Autobiographical
Memory
Take 2:
Autobiographical Memory

Childhood amnesia


First time events have
greater recall
Emotional Aspects
– Increase recall
– Increase fuzziness
Flashbulb Memories
– Great vividness, detail
– Narrative qualities:
setting, event,
outcome
– Confidence in veracity
is high but mostly
illusory
– ABM starts at about
four years of age
– Not especially accurate
before six years of age

Self?

False Memories
– ‘Lost at the mall’


Forgetting
Intrusion
Cognitive
Psychology
Autobiographical
Memory
Take 2: Autobiographical
Memory (Conway, 1991)

Self?
Cognitive
Psychology
Autobiographical
Memory
Episodic Memory
– Recollected episodes associated with visual information
– Not particularly sensical as self-reports by themselves (e.g.
when people relate their dreams)

Semantic Memory
– Knowledge we ‘remember’ about our past

Autobiographical Memory weaves episodic and semantic
memory together into scripts (plots) when we have an
occasion to give an account of ourselves
SM
SM
EM
SM
EM
SM
EM
EM
Take 2: Autobiographical
Memory

Self?
Cognitive
Psychology
Autobiographical
Memory
Autobiographical memory
– Narrative provides a context uniting knowledge and
recollection
– Draws from scripts learned in interaction as a small
child (Nelson and Fivush, 2000)
– Like the script that “things get better over time”
(Rubin & Bernsten, 2003)
– Scripts are embedded in culture and language (Ross,
Xun & and Bernsten, 2002)
SM
SM
EM
SM
EM
SM
EM
EM
The Narrative Self
Putting it together
Hermeneutic
Philosophy
The Narrative
Self
Self?

“As for the narrative unity
of a life, it must be seen as
an unstable mixture of
fabulation and actual
experience. It is precisely
because of the elusive
character of real life that
we need the help of fiction
to organize life
retrospectively, after the
fact, prepared to take as
provisional and open to
revision any figure of
emplotment borrowed from
fiction or history.”
– Ricoeur

“Our attitudes and our choices are, in
no small part, the consequence of the
“occasion of personhood” that
organisms concoct on the fly of each
instant. Little wonder, then, that we
can vary and waver, succumb to vanity
and betray, be malleable and voluble.
The potential to create our own
Hamlets, Iagos, and Falstaffs is inside
each one of us. Under the right
circumstances, aspects of those
characters can emerge, briefly and
transiently, one hopes. In some
respects it is astonishing that most of
us have only one character, although
there are sound reasons for the
singularity.
– Damasio
But …. (my hunches)



Does self-awareness faithfully
disclose our true selves – or is
self-awareness motivated?
(Think Freud here)
Are our true selves constituted
apart from others, or through
relationships with others?
(Recall who Jesus met in the
wilderness)
Is consistency all it’s cracked up
to be, or is there virtue in flipflopping?
Authentic
Leadership?
Authentic
Self?
Self?