This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It)
By BENEDICT CAREY (New York Times)
Published: May 22, 2007
For more than a century, researchers have been trying to work out the raw ingredients that account for personality, the sweetness and neuroses that make Anna Anna, the sluggishness and sensitivity that make Andrew Andrew. They have largely ignored the first-person explanation — the life story that people themselves tell about who they are, and why.
health/psychology/22narr.html?ex=1180756800&en=f9f85fb499d1eb72&ei=5070&emc=eta1">read on
6 comments:
sista sista, your link don't work, but hey, as if need an explanation, I am me, because I am fabulous.
works now bro'
The other day I was telling about the time I was reclining nude on a polar icecap and got attacked by tigers jumping out of the mouths of fish jumping out of pomegranates. What does that say about my personality?
I'm probably being thick but I'm struggling to see the novelty of their proposition: Freud's starting point was that the apparent ravings of "hysterics" were in fact individualised outpourings of unique experience. Dream analysis ("the royal road to the unconscious") was also predicated on an understanding of the uniqueness of the perceptions people had of themselves and their lives/life story. While Freud saw underlying themes that he imagined were common (Oedipal and Electra, for instance), the way each of those themes played out was unique.
People like the great & possibly insane Ronnie Laing saw individual "insane" responses as being logical adaptations to an insane world: but like most of the anti-psychiatrists he believed that the unique individual story was the starting point.
It is a commonplace in most therapeutic schools that the way we frame our perceptions of the world (and our part in it) has a profound effect on our current & future happiness - but that we all have the ability to reframe, to create a new story.
Then again, traditionally Aborigenes, for instance, have a quite different conception of the world, and a different approach to story telling. But those communal stories are a central part of their self-perceptions.
Um... you see, I'm struggling to understand what they are saying that is different?
i think i'm hungover.
it's all about freud, innit?
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