Narrative Psychology's Contribution to the Second Cognitive Revolution

Abstract

Cognitive revolution, beginning from the fifties, has made cognition the central topic in psychology. In the past decades, however, individualistic cognitive psychology has often been criticized. Several theoretical attempts were performed so as to replace or amend the study of information processing with the socially and culturally determined meaning construction. Narrative psychology, which is based on the fundamental role that the narrative function plays in constructing and communicating meaning, is one of these attempts. The branch of narrative psychology as we understand it considers narrative to be a natural form of organizing experiences, which shapes internal world of humans and, in the same time, links them to their society and culture. Narrative exists before the actual story, and stories generated either spontaneously or elicited in interviews carry the psychological meaning of people's internal world, as well as these stories reflect their relation to the world. Elementary linguistic forms ar...