Self Narratives

Chapters describe how clinicians can work with what is openly discussed, and how to ascertain less conscious events and motives. A powerful clinical tool that enhances cooperation between the client and therapist, the model delineated in this volume can be used in a wide variety of settings and is easily integrated with a range of orientations. Providing complete guidelines for its clinical use, Self-Narratives is an ideal resource for psychotherapists and counselors alike. Teachers or trainers who want to educate students in self-knowledge and self-reflection will find here an ideal method for stimulating these processes.

Histories of the Self interrogates historians’ work with personal narratives. It introduces students and researchers to scholarly approaches to diaries, letters, oral history and memoirs as sources that give access to intimate aspects of the past. Historians are interested as never before in how people thought and felt about their lives. This turn to the personal has focused attention on the capacity of subjective records to illuminate both individual experiences and the wider world within which narrators lived. However, sources such as letters, diaries, memoirs and oral history have been the subject of intense debate over the last forty years, concerning both their value and the uses to which they can be put. This book traces the engagement of historians of the personal with notions of historical reliability, and with the issue of representativeness, and it explores the ways in which they have overcome the scepticism of earlier practitioners. It celebrates their adventures with the meanings of the past buried in personal narratives and applauds their transformation of historical practice. Supported by case studies from across the globe and spanning the fifteenth to twenty-first centuries, Histories of the Self is essential reading for students and researchers interested in the ways personal testimony has been and can be used by historians.

Stories are central to our world. We form our families, our communities, and our nations through stories. It is through stories of our everyday experiences that each of us constructs an autobiographical self, a narrative identity, that confers a sense of coherence and meaning to our individual lives. In this volume, Robyn Fivush describes how this deeply personal autobiographical self is socially and culturally constructed. Family Narratives and the Development of an Autobiographical Self demonstrates that, through participating in family reminiscing, in which adults help children learn the forms and functions of talking about the past, young children come to understand and evaluate their experiences, and create a sense of self defined through individual and family stories that provide an anchor for understanding self, others, and the world. Fivush draws on three decades of research, from her own lab and from others, to demonstrate the critical role that family stories and family storytelling play in child development and outcome. This volume is essential reading for students and researchers interested in psychology, human development, and family studies.

You know who you are, right? Of course you do, you’re you! But what if who you think you are is actually holding you back, closing off exciting opportunities that are right in front of you, and preventing you from achieving your best potential? This book explores the concept of self-narrative, or the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are and our place in the world. In this book, I explore how understanding our own self-narratives and challenging them can enable you to change how you think about yourself and open up those opportunities that you could be missing. Using examples from my own journey, I provide a process that you can follow to increase your own self-awareness, understand what your self-narrative says and how it impacts your daily life, and gives a template on how to make changes to your narrative. We are powerful storytellers, telling ourselves our most impactful story of all. By understanding and changing your story you can make real positive change in your life. Use your own story to learn, grow and achieve what you want.

This book is a collection of essays on neglected aspects of the Great War. It begins by asking what exactly was so "Great" about it, before turning to individual studies of various aspects of the war. These fall broadly into two categories. Firstly personal, micro-narratives that deal directly with the experience of war, often derived from contemporary interest in diaries and oral histories. Presenting both a close-up view of the viscerality, and the tedium and powerlessness of personal situations, these same narratives also address the effects of the war on hitherto under-regarded groups such as children and animals. Secondly, the authors look at the impact of the course of the war on theatres, often left out in reflections on the main European combatants and therefore not part of the regular iconography of the trenches in places such as Denmark, Canada, India, the Levant, Greece and East Africa.

This book investigates how being diagnosed with various disabilities impacts on identity. Once diagnosed with a disability, there is a risk that this label can become the primary status both for the person diagnosed as well as for their family. This reification of the diagnosis can be oppressive because it subjugates humanity in such a way that everything a person does can be interpreted as linked to their disability. Drawing on narrative approaches to identity in psychology and social sciences, the bio-psycho-social model and a holistic approach to disabilities, the chapters in this book understand disability as constructed in discourse, as negotiated among speaking subjects in social contexts, and as emergent. By doing so, they amplify voices that may have otherwise remained silent and use storytelling as a way of communicating the participants' realities to provide a more in-depth understanding of their point of view. This book will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology, medical humanities, disability research methods, narrative theory, and rehabilitation studies.

As increasing quantities of health and biological information are generated, the need for us all to consider the human impacts of its ubiquity becomes more urgent than ever. This book explains the ethical imperative to take seriously the potential impacts on our identities of encountering bioinformation about ourselves.