Family Narratives and the Development of an Autobiographical Self

Social and Cultural Perspectives on Autobiographical Memory

Robyn Fivush

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429647260
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

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.

1

INTRODUCTION

We talk about the past in small snippets and long soliloquies. We share the stories of our lives with others and they share their stories with us; we commiserate, rejoice, condemn, and congratulate. We tell our stories to new acquaintances, to old friends, to family and foes, over the phone and over the dinner table. As William Faulkner writes, “The past is never dead; it is not even past” (1951/2011, 73). And as these stories are told over and over, to friends, to family, to ourselves, they take on new meanings and new evaluations. Through telling and retelling, the past continually evolves into the present, the story of who we are framed in the story of who we were and who we want to be, our autobiographical self. In this book I explore the process of becoming an “autobiographical self,” a self with a (hopefully) coherent sense of a past that has led to the person I am today and hope to be tomorrow. I will show how the rudimentary elements of an autobiographical self begin at birth, as infants are drawn into the cultural activities of remembering the personal past, and develop in systematic ways throughout childhood and adolescence, as individuals create a full narrative of self, or what Barnes (1998) calls the “story of me.”

The autobiographical self is intimately tied to our autobiographical memories. Autobiographical memory is the type of memory that most people mean when they say, “I remember.” It is accessible, conscious memory of events we have experienced in our lifetime. This may include a detailed memory of having lunch with your best friend at your favorite local hangout just yesterday, or memories of going to the beach with your family when you were a young child. In contrast to other types of memory, such as knowledge of geography (e.g., I know Paris is the capital of France), or history (Paris was liberated from the Germans on August 25, 1944), autobiographical memory contains memories of the self engaging in activities that have personal meaning (e.g., I remember walking down the Champs Elysées at sunset my first day in Paris). Indeed, what makes autobiographical memories special is that they are about the self (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Conway, Singer & Tagini, 2004; Fivush, 1988; 2008; McAdams, 2001).

Memories of our past experiences form the core of the autobiographical self, the story of who we are over time and in relation to others. But the autobiographical self goes well beyond the facts of what we recall of our experiences to include our interpretations, our evaluations, our thoughts and emotions, as well as those of others, weaving a complex story of human drama that unfolds over time. The autobiographical self certainly depends on our ability to recall the experiences of our lives, but it integrates so much more: our hopes and dreams, our fears and nightmares, who we want to be, and who we definitely do not want to become (Markus & Nurius, 1986). In this sense, the autobiographical self is both cognitive and social; autobiographical remembering is an evolving integration of thinking and feeling involved in recalling and organizing previous past experiences in ways that allow us to communicate to ourselves and to others who we are in the world, our values and beliefs, and our motivations and our goals.

The autobiographical self is also uniquely human (Donald, 2001; Fivush, 2010a; Nelson, 2003). Although as I will show in later chapters, infants and nonhuman animals are quite capable of recalling experiences and events in ways that allow them to predict and navigate their environment, only human beings create a story of who they are, linking disparate events into a coherent whole and explaining how they became the person they are today by employing frameworks that evaluate personal experiences through cultural ways of understanding what it means to be a self and to live a good life (Freeman, 2007). This is a remarkably complex accomplishment, and yet it occurs universally; although the forms and functions of an autobiographical self are culturally variable, as I will discuss at length in Chapter 11, all typically developing children in all cultures develop an autobiography, however sparse the story may be.

Moreover, as I show throughout this book, the autobiographical self emerges from reminiscing that occurs in everyday social interactions, in which we naturally and spontaneously share the experiences of our lives with others. We talk about the past all the time in everyday conversation. Think about your last phone call to a parent or an old friend, your last chat over coffee with a school or work colleague, your last conversation over the dinner table with friends or family. What did you talk about? The events of your day and of theirs, personal news, and “gossip” – stories about mutual friends and acquaintances. You talked about the past – yours, theirs, and others’. In fact, stories about the past emerge every five minutes in a typical family conversation (Bohanek, Fivush, Zaman, Lepore, Merchant & Duke, 2009; Miller, 1994). These may be stories of what happened to a specific family member that day, or just as likely, stories of the shared family past, such as holidays or outings, or even family history, stories of grandparents, or crazy Uncle Joe. In Chapter 8 I delve into the frequency and complexity of family stories across a typical dinner conversation, and how and why these kinds of family stories are so important. But it is not just families that reminisce so often. Among friends, sharing past experiences is just as frequent, especially if they were even slightly emotionally tinged. Studies show that more than 90 percent of everyday emotional experiences are shared with someone else within 48 hours of their occurrence (Rime, 2007; Rime, Finkenauer, Luminet, Zech & Pilippot, 1998). Why we reminisce about our past so much is an intriguing question that I will address throughout this book; that we reminisce about the past so much is unquestionable, and it is in this sharing that we come to understand and evaluate our own experiences in new ways and construct our own story alongside the stories of others. The autobiographical self, the heart of our personal sense of who we are, is very much constructed in social interactions that modulate the story we come to tell.

Especially interesting, we see substantial evidence of individual, gender, and cultural differences in how and what people remember about their lives (Nelson & Fivush, 2004; Wang, 2013). Explaining these differences requires a model that takes seriously how and why we recall our past, and how and why the social contexts in which remembering our past and ourselves are important. This book provides a sociocultural model of autobiographical memory that takes as its starting point that all human activity unfolds in everyday social interactions that allow for the expression and development of culturally appropriate forms of knowledge (Nelson, 1996; Rogoff, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978). Throughout, I document how our most personal memories, our dearest sense of self, are created and constructed within social interactions, interactions structured within family conversations embedded within social and cultural worldviews that provide models for what a self is and what a life should look like. Much of the book focuses on research conducted with broadly middle class, ethnically diverse U.S. families. Yet importantly, even within this kind of a broad cultural group, culture imbues every human interaction, influencing our language, our beliefs, and our values. This presupposition is threaded throughout the chapters, but cultural differences, per se, are only highlighted toward the end, in Chapter 11.

Because the autobiographical self is intimately tied to autobiographical memory, in Chapter 2 I provide the theoretical foundations for the autobiographical self within the framework of autobiographical memory, and I raise the question of the functions of autobiographical memory. If autobiographical memory is uniquely human and reconstructive, what functions might it serve in everyday life? I focus on two: defining self and defining relationships. A consideration of these primary functions highlights the social nature of autobiographical remembering and how sharing our memories with others helps shape them in particular ways. I thus end the chapter with a consideration of the cultural tools that sculpt our personal memories, life scripts, and master narratives, providing both the forms and functions of personal autobiography while equipping us to create both shared and personal understandings of what it means to be a person and to live a life.

With this more encompassing understanding of autobiographical memory, I turn in Chapter 3 to the specific concept of an autobiographical self and discuss the early foundations for this sense of self. I rely here on theoretical arguments first articulated by Katherine Nelson (1993; 2001; 2003), laying out the differential development of episodic and autobiographical memory and arguing for the complex set of skills that underlie true autobiographical memory, including the development of a sense of self in the present and in the past, and the link between them. I note at the outset that the autobiographical self is only one aspect of a self-concept, with no claims that the autobiographical self is either exclusive or exhaustive of self-definition. Rather, I agree with Neisser (1988) that the self is complex, consisting of multiple dynamically interacting aspects, including both implicit and explicit knowledge of our bodily state, of our mental state, and of our enduring goals and motivations, as well as knowledge of traits and dispositions (see also McAdams, 2015). The autobiographical self is that aspect of self defined by a temporally extended sense of one’s own experiences as creating the person one is today and will become tomorrow. In the personality literature, this self has been called “narrative identity” (McAdams & McLean, 2013), and I will return to this concept and the development of narrative identity as it relates to the concept of an autobiographical self, in Chapter 9, when I discuss issues of narrative identity that emerge in adolescence.

While the first three chapters lay out the arguments, definitions, and foundations for the autobiographical self, Chapter 4 turns more directly to the main arguments of the book, examining the now substantial research documenting profound and enduring individual differences in how parents, and especially mothers, reminisce with their preschool children. Mothers vary along a spectrum of elaboration, with highly elaborative mothers engaging in frequent, richly detailed, coherent, and emotionally expressive narrative co-construction with their children, whereas low-elaborative mothers reminisce in sparser and more repetitive ways. Both observational longitudinal and experimental intervention research confirms the consistency and efficacy of these differing styles in predicting children’s developing skills to narrate their own personal experiences in more elaborated and coherent ways. Intriguingly, research questioning which maternal and/or child characteristics might relate to an elaborative reminiscing style has not uncovered why some mothers are more elaborative than others. One factor to emerge is the gender of the child, with mothers and fathers generally more elaborative, and especially more emotionally expressive, with daughters than with sons, and I explore the precursors and consequences of this gender difference in Chapter 5.

Chapters 6 and 7 detail how elaborative maternal reminiscing is related to multiple developmental outcomes, both cognitive and socioemotional. In addition to predicting more elaborated and coherent personal narratives, higher levels of maternal elaborative reminiscing also predict higher levels of literacy skills upon entering school; better deliberate memory skills, including memory strategies, that are important for academic success; higher levels of understanding the mind of self and others; earlier understanding and better regulation of emotion; and finally, a more differentiated self-concept and higher self-esteem. The multiple and varied ways in which elaborative maternal reminiscing has been related to child outcome underscores the centrality of autobiographical memory as foundational for social and cognitive development.

Chapter 8 expands the discussion to include ways in which family narratives extend beyond the parent–child dyad. I present an ecological model of family narratives (Fivush & Merrill, 2016) that locates individual autobiography within embedded layers of family stories, including stories of experiences shared across family members and across the generations, as well as more temporally extended family histories that inform individual autobiographies and influence one’s personal sense of self.

Chapter 9 shifts from family reminiscing to the emergence of an individual life story. Drawing on Erikson’s (1968) psychosocial theories, I discuss the creation of a healthy identity as the major developmental task during adolescence, showing how multiple converging social and cognitive skills coalesce into an adolescent’s increasing abilities to create a coherent personal timeline that undergirds a more evaluative and goal-oriented life narrative. Bringing these developments into dialogue with my previous examination of family reminiscing and the scaffolding of individual personal narratives, I show how mothers continue to play a critical role in adolescents’ emerging abilities to construct coherent and evaluative life stories and how these developments build on earlier maternal elaborative reminiscing. Chapter 10 expands the idea of the autobiographical self into the family stories in which it is embedded. More specifically, I develop the idea of an intergenerational self, a self anchored in stories we know about our parents as they were growing up, and how these stories and stories of family history provide models of the ways the world works and how lives unfold. I also show how these kinds of intergenerational narratives are linked to adolescents’ and young adults’ sense of self and well-being.

Whereas I note throughout the book that the autobiographical self is socioculturally constructed, Chapter 11 turns explicitly to the ways in which culture influences both family reminiscing and individual life narratives. Contrasting cultural dimensions of independence and interdependence, I review research comparing European American and Asian American families, then delve a bit deeper to explore the complexities of these overly simple dichotomies. Cultures that value a more autonomous and independent notion of self encourage individuals to construct elaborated life stories that focus on individuals’ thoughts and emotions, on how their experiences make them uniquely themselves. In contrast – though in only general terms – individuals in more interdependently oriented cultures create less elaborated life stories that focus more on social communities and the common good. These differences are reflected in early maternal reminiscing styles, in that mothers in more independently oriented cultures reminisce in more elaborated and emotionally expressive ways than do mothers in interdependently oriented cultures. How culture is transmitted across the generations through family reminiscing provides a window into how individual lives are constructed in cultural contexts.

As may be apparent even in this introduction, for the most part I focus on the positive aspects of family reminiscing. Chapter 12, however, turns to the dark side of family narratives. Sometimes narratives of tragedy and trauma can become uplifting and provide models of strength and resilience – but sometimes they do not. Narratives of trauma, for example, can be debilitating, whether told or untold. For children growing up in families with dark and difficult stories, or with silenced stories involving transgressions either committed by or inflicted on family members, the very lack of stories may signal distress and disquiet. This chapter spotlights the very limited research on this aspect of family storytelling, placing it in the larger context of what we know about narratives of trauma more broadly.

In Chapter 13 I bring the story about stories to a close. From its early beginnings in infancy, when babies are drawn into telling and sharing stories, to the growing ability to narrate personal experiences in coherent ways, to the incorporation of personal experiences in a personal timeline that defines a life trajectory linked through time and across people, the development of the autobiographical self unfolds across a lifetime.

We are the stories we tell about ourselves, and the stories told about us. Because stories are at the core of my argument, I include many narrative examples throughout the book, examples of parents and children co-constructing the shared past, of families telling and re-telling stories that knit together their identity through time, and of individuals recounting significant events, experiences that define who they are and what they value. The examples come from studies that my students, colleagues, and I have been conducting in The Family Narratives Lab at Emory University since 1988. Over the last three decades we have visited hundreds of families in their homes and asked hundreds of individuals to tell us their stories, both face to face and online. All of these individuals and families have graciously given their time and their permission to use and report these narratives, although we of course use pseudonyms throughout. For our audio recordings, we employ a simple transcription system, transcribing whole words without linguistic inflections, although we do add punctuation when the prosody is clear and mark sounds of laughing and crying. We use < > to indicate overlapping talk. When we cannot make out a word, we simply transcribe it as (unintelligible). For our written narratives, we transcribe as written, often with misspellings, nongrammatical constructions, and cross-outs. As we have collected these narratives and worked with these families and listened to these stories, our ideas have evolved. Our research participants shared more than their stories with us; they shared their own ideas about how and why stories are important. It is that story that I hope to tell in this book.

2

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY

Theoretical Foundations

In the 1958 musical comedy Gigi, two old friends who once shared a romance, Honoré Lachaille and Madame Alvarez, reminisce about their time together when young, singing a duet in which a particularly romantic evening is jointly recounted. As the song goes on, Honoré recalls details of the experience, all of which Madame corrects: they dined with friends, not alone, it was in June, not April, and so on, to which Honoré responds, yes, he remembers it well! All of us resonate to this lyrical exchange; all of us reminisce about emotional and important moments in our life, elaborating and ruminating on the details, som...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Narratives
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Autobiographical Memory: Theoretical Foundations
• 3 The Autobiographical Self: Developmental Foundations
• 4 Maternal Reminiscing Style: The Emergence of Individual Differences in the Autobiographical Self
• 5 The Developing Autobiographical Self: How Gender Matters
• 6 Why Reminiscing Matters: How Early Parent–Child Reminiscing Shapes Cognitive Outcomes
• 7 Why Reminiscing Matters: How Early Parent–Child Reminiscing Shapes Social and Emotional Outcomes
• 8 Family Reminiscing: How Families Share the Personal and Family Past
• 9 The Life Story: Adolescence and the Emergence of an Autobiographical Voice
• 10 Beyond the Autobiographical Self: The Intergenerational Self
• 11 Beyond the Autobiographical Self: The Cultural Self
• 12 The Dark Side of Family Stories
• 13 The Autobiographical Self: Beginnings, Middles, and Ends
• References
• Index