Week 11 Making A Life The Stores We Live By Chapter 10 PDF

## Chapter 10 Life Scripts, Life Stories ### The Meaning of Stories - The narrating mind - Human beings are storytellers by nature. - The story appears in every known human culture. - Storytelling appears to be a fundamental way of expressing ourselves and our worlds. - Think of the last time you...

## Chapter 10 Life Scripts, Life Stories ### The Meaning of Stories - The narrating mind - Human beings are storytellers by nature. - The story appears in every known human culture. - Storytelling appears to be a fundamental way of expressing ourselves and our worlds. - Think of the last time you tried to explain something really important about yourself to another person. - The chances are good that you accomplished this task by telling a story. - Think of an especially intimate conversation from your past. - I suspect that what made the conversation good was the kind of stories that were told and the manner in which the stories were received. - Indeed, much of what passes for everyday conversation between people is storytelling of one form or another. - We are born to tell stories, some scholars suggest. - This is part of what makes us so different from both the beasts and the computers. - Imagine our ancient ancestors, at day's end, in that ambiguous interlude between the victories and defeats of the daylight and the deep sleep of the dark. - Home from the hunt, or resting at the end of a day's foraging for food, providing for the young, or defending the tribe, our primordial forebears sit down together and take stock. - Before night falls, they tell stories of the day. - They pass the time by making sense of past time. - They tell of their experiences to entertain and enlighten each other, and perhaps, on occasion, just to stay awake. - The stories told at day's end created a shared history of people, linking them in time and event, as actors, tellers, and audience in an unfolding drama of life that was made more in the telling than in the actual events to be told. ### Healing and Integration - We are drawn to stories for many reasons. - Stories entertain us, making us laugh and cry, keeping us in suspense until we learn how it is all going to turn out. - Stories instruct. - We learn how to act and live through stories; we learn about different people, settings, and ideas. - Aesop's fables and the parables of Jesus suggest lessons-some simple and some profound-about good and bad behavior, moral and immoral ways of conducting our lives, dilemmas concerning what is right and what is wrong. - Beyond entertaining and edifying us, stories may also function to integrate aspects of our lives and heal that which is sick or broken. - Some scholars and scientists have suggested that integration and healing are two primary psychological functions of stories and storytelling. - Stories may bring our lives together when we feel shattered, mend us when we are broken, heal us when we are sick, help us cope in times of stress, and even move us toward psychological fulfillment and maturity. ### Feeling and Story: Tomkins's Script Theory - **Affects** - The central role of story and storytelling in human lives is one defining feature of the broad perspective on personality offered by Silvan Tomkins. - Tomkins came to psychology as a storywriter. - It was through dramatic narrative that Tomkins first wrestled with the question that ultimately drove his life's work: "What do human beings really want?" - Though Tomkins initially accepted Murray's belief that psychogenic needs were the main factors in human motivation, he soon departed from this view in favor of a theory emphasizing affect, or human emotion. - The first discovery occurred in the late 1940s when Tomkins was struck by the sudden insight that such affects as excitement, joy, and anger are independent of drives, such as hunger and sexuality, but amplify drives by providing them with motivational power. - The second discovery occurred when he became a father. - Tomkins articulated a broad theory of human emotion that proposes the existence of some 10 primary affects, each rooted in human biology and evolution. - Each affect is linked to characteristic movements of the muscles in the face. - Thus, the face may be considered the organ of emotion. ### Scenes and Scripts - **Basic Concepts** - If affect is the supreme motivator in life, scenes and scripts are the great organizers. - Tomkins viewed the person as a playwright who fashions his or her own personal drama from the earliest weeks of life. - The basic component of the drama is the scene, the memory of a specific happening or event in one's life that contains at least one affect and one object of that affect. - Each scene is an "organized whole that includes persons, place, time, actions, and feelings". - We may each view our own lives, therefore, as a series of scenes, one after the other, extending from birth to the present. - But certain kinds of scenes appear again and again, and certain typical groupings or families of scenes can be discerned. - Scripts enable us to make sense of the relations among various scenes. - A script is a set of rules for interpreting, creating, enhancing, or defending against a family of related scenes. - Each of us organizes the many scenes in our lives according to our own idiosyncratic scripts. ### Types of Scripts - **Commitment Scripts** - The person binds him or herself to a life program or goal that promises the reward of intense positive affect. - A commitment script involves a long-term investment in "improving things." - Commitment scripts begin with an intensely positive early scene or series of scenes from childhood. - This scene of enjoyment or excitement comes to represent an optimistic ideal of what might be-a Garden of Eden from the past that holds out the hope of a paradise in the future, the pursuit of which becomes one's life task. - Commitment scripts are not likely to entail significant conflict between competing goals or troubling ambivalence about any single goal. - The person whose life is organized around a strong commitment script strives, instead, to accomplish his or her desired paradise with singleness of purpose and steadfast dedication, much like Jerome Johnson. - **Nuclear Scripts** - Nuclear scripts are generally marked by ambivalence and confusion about one's life goals. - A nuclear script always involves complex approach-avoidance conflicts. - The person is irresistibly drawn toward and repelled by particularly conflictual scenes in his or her life narrative. ### Narrative Identity - In adolescence and young adulthood modern people are faced with the psychosocial challenge of constructing a self that provides their lives with unity, purpose, and meaning. - As we address these questions, Erikson maintained, we begin to construct what he called a configuration, which includes "constitutional givens, idiosyncratic libidinal needs, significant identifications, effective defenses, successful sublimations, and consistent roles" - The identity configuration works to integrate "all identifications with the vicissitudes of the libido, with the aptitudes developed out of endowment, and with the opportunities offered in social roles". - What might this unique "configuration" of identity look like? - I have argued that the identity configuration of which Erikson speaks should be seen first and foremost as an integrative life story that a person begins to construct in late adolescence and young adulthood. ### Development of the Life Story - It is in adolescence that we first come to recognize that, living in a modern society, our lives need some form of purpose and meaning. ### What is a Good Story? - People are working on their life stories, consciously and unconsciously, throughout most of their adult years. - At times, the work is fast and furious, as during phases of exploration and moratorium. ### When Did Identity Become a Problem? - The problem of narrative identity may be a modern problem, most characteristic of middle-class Westerners living in industrial societies. - In more agrarian and traditional societies, and at earlier points in history, the problem of constructing a self-defining life story may not have been as crucial. - Even among the intellectuals of Western societies, however, the notion that a person should find or create a unique self may be a relatively recent idea. - As Europe entered what has been termed the Romantic era in the last decade of the 1700s, the two great institutions of church and state were undergoing major transformation. ### Summary - While personality traits provide an initial sketch and characteristic adaptations fill in the details of psychological individuality, narrative approaches to personality address directly the question of what a life means, in particular what it means to the person who is living it. - Human beings are storytellers by nature, and stories appear in every known human culture. - While stories entertain and inform, they also serve to integrate and heal. - Tomkins's script theory of personality puts the role of narratives at the center of psychological individuality. - McAdams's narrative approach focuses on Erikson's concept of identity. - Research has examined life-story scenes or episodes for the central themes of agency and communion. - Self-defining memories are vividly remembered, emotionally charged and tend to be repetitive; they are linked to an unresolved theme or issue in a person's life story. - Recent research has sought to delineate different types of life stories. - Some life stories may be better or more adaptive than others. ### Feature 10.A: Time and Story in Bali - The philosopher Paul Ricoeur writes that "time becomes human time to the extent it is organized after the manner of narrative; narrative in turn is meaningful to the extent it portrays the features of temporal existence". - What Ricoeur means is that human beings tend to comprehend time in terms of story. - Imagine a society, however, in which human conduct is not situated in time as we understand it. - Anthropologist Clifford Geertz describes just such a society among the people of Bali. ### Feature 10.B: When Did Identity Become a Problem? - The problem of narrative identity may be a modern problem, most characteristic of middle-class Westerners living in industrial societies. - In more agrarian and traditional societies, and at earlier points in history, the problem of constructing a self-defining life story may not have been as crucial.