Historical Tales and National Identity

An introduction to narrative social psychology

János László

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134746507
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Psychology

Social psychologists argue that people's past weighs on their present. Consistent with this view, Historical Tales and National Identity outlines a theory and a methodology which provide tools for better understanding the relation between the present psychological condition of a society and representations of its past. Author Janos Laszlo argues that various kinds of historical texts including historical textbooks, texts derived from public memory (e.g. media or oral history), novels, and folk narratives play a central part in constructing national identity. Consequently, with a proper methodology, it is possible to expose the characteristic features and contours of national identities.

In this book Laszlo enhances our understanding of narrative psychology and further elaborates his narrative theory of history and identity. He offers a conceptual model that draws on diverse areas of psychology - social, political, cognitive and psychodynamics - and integrates them into a coherent whole. In addition to this conceptual contribution, he also provides a major methodological innovation: a content analytic framework and software package that can be used to analyse various kinds of historical texts and shed new light on national identity. In the second part of the book, the potential of this approach is empirically illustrated, using Hungarian national identity as the focus. The author also extends his scope to consider the potential generalizations of the approach employed.

Historical Tales and National Identity will be of great interest to a broad range of student and academic readers across the social sciences and humanities: in psychology, history, cultural studies, literature, anthropology, political science, media studies, sociology and memory studies.

Part I

Foundation to narrative social psychology

1 Narrative psychology

Narratives are generally conceived as accounts of events, which involve some temporal and/or causal coherence (Hoshmand, 2005). This minimal definition is usually amended with criteria according to which a story requires some goal-directed action of living or personified actors taking place in time. A full blown narrative involves an initial steady state which implies the legitimate order of things including the characters’ normal wishes and beliefs, a trouble which disturbs this state, efforts for reestablishing the normal state, a new, often transformed state and an evaluation in conclusion, which draws the moral of the story.

Narratives permeate every sector of human life. As Roland Barthes writes:

narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting, … stained-glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. … Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.

(Barthes, 1977: 79)

More cogently, Hardy (1968: 5) has written: ‘we dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative’.

Narratives whether oral, written or pictural are bound to narrative thinking. It is a natural, that is, universal, innate capacity of the human mind. Evolutionary arguments for narrative thinking stress its capacity for encoding deviations from the ordinary and its mimetic force. Ricoeur (1984–1987) derives mankind’s concept of time from narrative capacity. Recently, brain mechanisms of narrative thinking are traced by sophisticated brain-imaging devices. Nevertheless, narrative forms just as time concepts or languages show a wide cultural variety. This variation provides ground to socio-cultural theories of narrative on the lead of Vygotsky 1978), which stress the cultural evolution of narrative forms. According to these theories narrative genres model characteristic intentions, goals and values of a group sharing a culture (e.g. Brockmeier, Wang and Olson, 2002).

Following the lead of Erikson and Ricoeur, the ‘omnipresent’ narratives have been taken into the focus of self psychology by psychoanalytic authors such as Spence (1982) and Schafer (1980) in the early 1980s. However, the term ‘narrative psychology’ comes from a different branch of psychology, that is, from the social constructionist tradition. Sarbin (1986) published an influential book with this title. In the introductory chapter of this volume, he claims that human conduct can best be explained through stories. The volume collected a series of studies which applied narrative to interpretation of psychological phenomena, mainly of identity processes. According to Sarbin, life story unfolds an identity plan: by telling the story the narrator (the ‘I’) builds the social part of her self. The content of the life story provides an opportunity to infer the wishes, goals and engagements of the narrator. These inferences can be made against an interpretative horizon which comprises knowledge of the social, cultural and historical context of the life story. Sarbin’s book launched hermeneutic narrative psychology which has since inspired its own journal (The Journal of Narrative and Life History; from 1998, Narrative Inquiry), and has applied interpretative methodology ever since.

We should notice, however, that the field we call narrative psychology today is more complex. At the same time as Sarbin’s Narrative Psychology, Bruner (1986) published his book Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. In this book and in the subsequent Acts of Meaning Bruner (1990) suggests a narrative paradigm which, as opposed to hermeneutic analysis, makes narrative meaning construction a subject of empirical studies. Bruner distinguishes between two kinds of knowing. When we think in terms of paradigmatic or logical–scientific mode, we work with abstract concepts, construe truth by means of empirical evidence and methods of formal logic, and while doing so, we seek causal relations that lead to universal truth conditions. When we use the narrative mode, we investigate human or human-like intentions and acts, as well as the stories and consequences related to them. What justifies this mode is life-likeness rather than truth, and it aspires to create a realistic representation of life. In other words, narrative thinking aspires to make sense or to establish coherence. Narrative thinking is expressed in narrative language. What Bruner discovered was that linguistic transformations reflect internal processes of meaning construction. When he amended the landscape of action (what characters do in a story) with the landscape of consciousness (what we know about their beliefs, intentions, wishes and emotions), he opened up the opportunity for studying the meaning of actions.

Bruner also stresses the creative nature of narrative.

A developed narrative, then, is not simply an account of what happened, but implies much more about the psychological perspectives taken toward those happenings. Accordingly, one deep reason why we tell stories to ourselves (or to our confessor or to our analyst or to our confidant) is precisely to ‘make sense’ of what we are encountering in the course of living – through narrative elaborations of the natural arguments of action. A developed narrative, then, is not simply an account of what happened, but implies much more about the psychological perspectives taken toward those happenings.

(Bruner and Lucariello, 1989: 79)

Beyond theoretical considerations, Bruner, once having been a pioneer of cognitive psychology, now stresses the importance of including the historical and cultural context of the psychological processes into the empirical studies. Following Vygotsky, he claims that empirical models can be built and tested where cultural and historical factors are taken into account. In one of his classic studies he inferred from the changes in lingusitic and narrative characteristics of crib monologues of a little girl, Emily, to the changing relationships between language, thinking, action and emotion in the course of development.

By the mid-1980s, the role of narratives had also significantly changed in personality psychology. McAdams (1985) formalized the life history interview, and elaborated a coding system for analysing life historical narratives. Following Erikson (1959) he assumed a correspondence between life history and personal identity. He disentangled four constructive elements in life history/identity: nuclear episodes, imagos, ideology and generativity script. Themetic lines, that is, recurrent thematic contents, are related to these four components. According to McAdams, the dominant content units and themes are related to the motives of power and intimacy.

Narrative complexity is considered by McAdams as an indicator of maturity. Both story structure and story content matter. Life stories vary both in content and in structure. In relatively simple stories there are few characters, the plot is linear, there are few embedded episodes. On the contrary, complex stories use many elements and differentations. The narrator establishes various relations between different elements, and synthetizes elements and relations into a hierarchical order. Complexity is considered as a developmental indicator, because it shows to what extent personal experiences are differentiated and integrated. At a less mature developmental level, individual frame of meaning is relatively simple. It adopts a holistic, either–or stance when understanding personal and social phenomena. Maturity entails a differentiated and hierarchically integrated frame of individual meaning where paradoxes and contradictions can be tolerated and individuality of others is acceptable.

It is transparent that McAdams’ narrative model with all of its ingredients is based on the analysis of psychological content of life narratives. This psychological content analyis is performed in terms of a previously construed identity model with categories such as imagos, nuclear episodes, thematic lines, etc. McAdams not only introduced life narrative into the study of personal identity as an empirical data source, but also tested the validity of his model by projective techniques. Nevertheless, because of the high abstraction level of the categories of the model, the content analysis is highly interpretative; consequently, it entails several uncertainties.

At the same time, Luborsky has enriched the methodology of the dynamic short therapies with the core conflictual theme method (Luborsky and Crits-Cristop, 1998), which is essentially an analysis of the life episodes occurring during therapy from the perspective of interpersonal relations. Luborsky exploited the fact that relationship episodes can easily be disentangled in therapeutic discourse. Based on the behavioural intentions and internal states emerging in behaviour and thinking, he worked out a coding system for the analysis of these episodes. The codes are related to the wishes of the patient, the responses of the other person, and the reactions of the patient’s self to the response of the other person are coded. Recurrent relational patterns of the patient, for example her wish to approach is turned down by the other person and she reacts to refusal with disappointment and sadness, contributes to understanding the psychopathology of the patient, although they do not have immediate diagnostic validity, that is, they can not be assigned to specific personality disorders or syndromes.

And the list is still not complete. Toward the end of the 1980s was the time when James Pennebaker began to match linguistic (lexical and structural) characteristics of life stories with personality and social psychological variables (Pennebaker, 1993). His research focused on the healing effects of transforming stressful life episodes into coherent narratives. For instance, he provided evidence that only fifteen minutes writing a day about emotional experiences over three days can positively influence one’s physical and mental health. This effect could be observed independently from culture, social status, gender and age. Improvement depended on the coherence of the stories and on the distribution of cognitive versus emotion words in the text. Those subjects improved most whose stories became day by day more coherent, changed negative emotion words to positive ones, and increased the number of cognitive words. Similar results were obtained by Stephenson, László, Ehmann, Lefever and Lefever (1997), who analysed therapeutic diaries of alcoholics. The therapy proved to be successful in those cases when patients initially related to themselves and to therapy negatively, and this relation changed during therapy to a positive direction.

Last but not least, by the mid-1980s, stories became one of the central topics of the mainstream experimental psychology, partly as story comprehension and production (Bobrow and Collins, 1984; Black, Galambos and Read, 1984; Mandler, 1984; Rumelhart, 1975; Thorndyke, 1977), and partly as organizing principle of autobiographical memory (Neisser, 1982; Rubin, 1996).

Summing up, narrative has been put into the forefront of psychological inquiry in various areas. Although the term narrative psychology originally referred to hermeneutic interpretation of life stories, narrative became a key concept in several fields of psychological studies.

Scientific narrative psychology

Recently, a new direction of narrative psychology has emerged, which draws on the scientific traditions of psychological study, but adds to the existing theories by pursuing the empirical study of psychological meaning construction (László et al., 2002b; 2007; László, 2008). This conception of narrative psychology can be conceived as an attempt to reconcile the ‘two cultures’ of natural and human sciences (Snow, 1993). Our contention is that many fields of psychology, for example studying personality or cultural processes, because of the complexity of the phenomena under study, requires concerted application of scheme-like interpretative and bottom-up analytic methodologies (Hayek, 1967). Given that narrative has material, empirical qualities, for example it has various structures, and it can plausibly be related to identity, it seems to be a potential means for enabling empirical study of complex psychological processes of identity construction. This approach differs significantly from the hermeneutic analysis of narratives, which tries to unpack meanings of identity on the background of the social, cultural and textual context of the text without testing empirically the interpretations. It also differs from earlier psychometric studies, which established correlations between language use and psychological states (Pennebaker and King 1999; Pennebaker et al. 2003) and from cognitive studies of narratives which study narratives from an information processing perspective.

Scientific narrative psychology takes seriously the interrelations between language and human psychological processes or narrative and identity. It assumes that studying narratives as vehicles of complex psychological contents leads to empirically based knowledge about human social adaptation. Individuals in their life stories, just like groups in their group histories, compose their significant life episodes. In this composition, which is meaning construction in itself, they express the ways in which they organize their relations to the social world, or construct their identity. Organizational characters and experiential qualities of these stories tell about the potential behavioural adaptation and the coping capacities of the storytellers (see László, 2008: 4–5).

Another remarkable novelty comes from the recognition of correspondences between narrative organization and psychological organization, namely from the fact that narrative features of self-narratives, for example the characters’ functions, the temporal characteristics of the story, or the speakers’ perspectives, will provide information about the features and conditions of self-representations. Similarly, the stories about the world will disclose the psychological features of social representations. In this sense, scientific narrative psychology exploits achievements of narratology. However, whereas narratology studies effects of narrative composition on readers’ understanding and experience, scientific narrative psychology is directed to how narrative composition expresses inner states of the narrator.

Scientific narrative psychology strives to concerted application of top-down and bottom-up methodologies, because it studies highly complex issues of identity, culture and society. In order to study the experiential organizations and qualities of life narratives and group narratives the methodology of narrative psychological content analysis has been developed. This methodology is based on narratological concepts and on social psychological theories of language use. Narratology has described the limited number of elements and variations of these elements in narrative composition. These compositional factors can be reliably identified in discourse. Narrative components correspond to certain processes or states of experiential organization or psychological meaning construction. For instance, using a retrospective narrative perspective as opposed to experiencing or re-experiencing perspectives when telling a traumatic life event suggests emotional balance, that is, that the storyteller managed to elaborate the negative experience and restore the integrity of his or her identity. In an experiment, Pólya et al. (2005) provided evidence supporting the above assumption. Traumatic life events, such as the failure of an in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment, were reported from different perspectives. The use of the different perspectives can be illustrated with the following excerpts: ‘I was waiting in the doctor’s office … The doctor entered the room … He told me that we had not succeeded …’ (retrospective perspective). ‘It was in the doctor’s office … I see the doctor entering the room … I don’t remember how it could happen …’ (re-experiencing perspective). Subjects consistently evaluated the target person as having better emotional control, higher social value and more stable identity when they read retrospective stories as opposed to reexperienced ones (for more detail, see László, 2008: 5).

The above example illustrates how narrative psychological content analysis transforms structural variables of narratology to psychological variables. In the first step, it assigns psychological categories to the structural variables, beginning with qualitative decisions, which attribute some meaning to certain textual elements. In psychology, this meaning is usually psychological meaning. The analysis does not stop, however, at this qualitative phase. Narrative psychological content analysis treats the content analytical codes as values of psychological variables, which, in turn, will become quantifiable and statistically processable.

Beyond the perspective, narratives contain other compositional devices such as time structure and time experience, characters’ agency, characters’ mental involvement, coherence, evaluation, spatial and interpersonal relations of the characters, etc. This limited number of compositional ‘slots’ corresponds to a similarly limited number of psychological constructions, whereas the text can be endlessly variable on the surface level (i.e. linguistically). Based on the narrative compositional elements, algorithms have been constructed that are able to automatically detect and quantitatively process the linguistic features of each element (Ehmann et al. 2007; Hargitai et al. 2007; László et al. 2007; Pohárnok et al. 2007; Pólya et al. 2007).

Automatization of narrative psychological content analysis

As it was explained previously, narratology described composition of narratives by a finite number of components as well as a finite number of variations of these components. Each component and each of their variations may be identified reliably at the level of the text. At the same time, such defined components of a narrative may be associated with psychological meanings of an experiential nature. A narrative contains a finite number of structural or compositional ‘loci’ where a likewise finite number of psychologically meaningful contents may be placed while surface text is potentially infinitely variable. Automatization of narrative psychological content analysis utilizes this relationship (László, 2008).

Automatization is implemented in multiple stages as well. At the first stage, text-analytic language technological instruments have to be equipped with morphologically annotated dictionaries. So far, the programme is quite similar to dictionary-based, content-analytic software developed in the English language such as the General Inquirer (Stone et al., 1966) or the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker et al., 2001). A morphologically analysed lexicon of Hungarian word forms has been compiled. At the next stage, usage contexts of the studied narrative components, that is, those of words indicating psychological meaning associated with the components have to be specified or disambiguated. For example, the Hungarian equivalent of the verb ‘like’ may express either an emotion or an intention, thus it has to be taken into account either among emotions or among intentions depending on the usage context. Disambiguation of meaning is carried out by means of so-called local grammars. An excellent opportunity for the construction of such analytic algorithms is provided by the NooJ linguistic development environment (Silberztein, 2008) in which local grammars for the dictionaries of narrative components have been constructed. Linguistic structures de...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of figures
• Preface
• Part I Foundation to narrative social psychology
• Part II Hungarian national identity in historical narratives
• Part III Collective trauma
• Appendix I Narratives presented in the questionnaire on events in which the Hungarians were victims of aggression by outgroups
• Appendix II Narratives presented in the questionnaire on events in which the Hungarians were perpetrators of aggression against outgroups
• Appendix III History textbooks 1920–2010
• Appendix IV Daily papers included in the media analysis classified according to political orientation
• References
• Index