by Reg Harris

Copyright © 2004 by Reg Harris. All rights reserved. Updated November 2009. Apart from properly cited quotes and short excerpts, no part of this article can be copied or used in any form without written permission from the author. For permission to use, please contact me.

We strive to make sense in our lives by arranging our experience of events so that it forms a coherent pattern of meaningful relationships, a personal narrative, myth or story. This evolving structure creates our inner reality (Feinstein & Krippner, 1997). An effective narrative provides a sense of continuity across time and arranges experiences so that they can be used to anticipate future events (White & Epston, 1990). Yet, in a very real sense, we don’t have our stories; we are our stories. Our stories form the abstract mental structure we call the narrative identity or narrative self.

We achieve our personal identities and self-concept through the use of the narrative configuration, and make our existence into a whole by understanding it as an expression of a single unfolding and developing story. We are in the middle of our stories and cannot be sure how they will end; we are constantly having to revise the plot as new events are added to our lives (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 116).

The self, then, is not an autonomous entity; it is a process, with the sense of a stable self being an abstraction arising from this process. The stable self exists only through interpreting and organizing our lived experiences into a coherent, historical unity that encompasses not only our memories and feelings, but our anticipations for the future (Bruner, 1990). The self is a unified collection of experiences, and the sense behind that collection constitutes our meaning in life. Furthermore, the meanings created through the self-creation process become roles within the story as a whole, while, concurrently, the story’s unity and effectiveness depends on being composed of appropriate constituent meanings (Bruner, 1996, 137).

This interrelationship between the parts and the whole makes the self-making process hermeneutic. As Bruner (1996) wrote, “A story's parts and its whole must, as it were, be made to live together” (p. 137), and when the whole story seizes our interest, drawing us toward new meaning, the story’s parts suddenly pique our curiosity and take on a new, irresistible attraction. Bruner calls this the “hermeneutic compulsion,” and it is very similar to what Grondin (1994) said about the self being compelled by expectations of meaning, which I described earlier.

To create our stories, we use narrative to organize, shape and give meaning to the randomness of experience, to complete the gestalt of self (Bruner, 1990; McAdams, 1883; Ricoeur, 1981; White & Epston, 1990). We are compelled to unify the self and to keep it functioning in harmony with the world as we perceive it. Thus, through narrative we construct our worlds and ourselves. We define and elaborate who we are through the stories we tell ourselves and others (Williams, D., 1995). “We all think of ourselves . . . as central characters in the drama of life. Each of us may be hero or heroine, or criminal or rogue or onlooker or any other character in the drama.” (May, 1991, p. 33). Our story provides the stage for our experiences, a place where our lives are “in play” (Bruner, 1996) and where we gain a sense of being in the world.

Our story or personal narrative not only gives structure to experience, it determines which of the events we perceive will be allowed into the narrative. When events do not readily fit our narrative, we can do essentially three things: assimilate it, distort it, or repress it. If we assimilate the event, we modify our narrative to accommodate the experience, which enhances our understanding. However, if we cling to the narrative self as if it were permanent, we might need to distort our perception of the event so that it will fit into our existing story. If the event is so far outside our current horizon of understanding (as in many cases of PTSD), we may repress or hide it because dealing with it would cause too much pain and too much disruption to our self. Repression and distortion are both pathogenic. They leave the gestalt of the self incomplete because even if a contradictory experience is distorted or repressed from immediate awareness, we have acknowledged it and know that it must be storied to return psychological harmony.

As we develop meaning and identity, we impose coherence on the past. When a new experience or perspective changes our view of life, it disrupts our interpretation of our past. We reinterpret the past (revise our story) in light of the new information to make it coherent with who we are (Bruner, 1996). Our story becomes, as O’Brien (1990) wrote a means to show how we got from where were to where we are. This hermeneutic process of revisiting the parts of our lives to bring them into coherence with our new present is the foundation of the journey process.

Revising our narrative or reinterpreting our past requires reflection, and to reflect, we must disengage ourselves from life for a period of time. Stepping out of life shuts off the flow of new experience until we can assimilate the events we have already experienced. In a sense, disengagement distances us from our self. I am reminded of the adage, “The only way to see where you are is to go somewhere else and look back.” O’Brien (1990) provides a good example of this process of disengagement and revision in his chapter “On the Rainy River.”

In this story, O'Brien describes his emotions and perceptions during the summer when he struggled with the question of going to Vietnam or running to Canada. In the critical part of that story, he took his car and drove north until he got to the Rainy River, which separates Canada from the United States. There, with the help of an old man who ran the motel in which he stayed, O’Brien made his decision to go to war. Looking back, more than two decades later, he wrote, “I sometimes wonder if the events of that summer didn’t happen in some other dimension, a place where your life exists before you’ve lived it, and where it goes afterward” (p. 57). Here, O’Brien expresses the hermeneutic nature of the narrative self, of having to step out of our stories so that we can reprocess them to give them new meaning in the context of present experience or understanding.

This cyclic movement, reflection-engagement-reflection, illustrates another crucial element of the narrative self: it demands action. Engagement in the world is the expressive aspect of meaning. It continues the self-making process which reflection began, and it drives the hermeneutic of being. What’s more, we need life’s responses to our actions to discover and define ourselves. We express and explore our true potentials – and limitations – when we act. Finally, action tells us where we are in our lives; we cannot see what needs to be done next, unless we have acted in the first place(Batchelor, 1983).

Besides providing continuity and perspective, our story, or dominant narrative, eventually limits our ability to comprehend new events. Because it filters events, the dominant narrative keeps much of our lived experience from being storied or assimilated (Bruner, 1990; White & Epston, 1990). This may leave us with a sense of incompleteness or “unfinishedness” (an incomplete gestalt). When this happens, we fill in the story’s gaps with the mortar of narrative, which may or may not be true to our lived experience.

Realizing that our dominant narrative can both guide us in giving meaning to experience and restrict our permeability to new interpretations of that experience, we must monitor the degree to which we identify with our stories so that they remain open and flexible enough to assimilate or “script” new experiences. Thus, our stories will grow, digesting events and relationships, assimilating and harmonizing with the stories of others. Ironically, the larger our stories get, the more general and adaptive they become, and our self concept gradually loses its confining rigidity. Eventually, our stories are completely permeable and, in a sense, they become life itself (this concept was adapted from a discussion of computational programs in Bruner, 1996). The pattern of the heroic journey is a map for this continuing process of revising and expanding our personal narratives.

Batchelor, S.  (1983). Alone with others: An existential approach to Buddhism (1st ed.). NY: Grove.

Bruner, J.  (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Bruner, J.  (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Feinstein, D. & Krippner, S. (1997). They mythic path. New York: G. P. Putnam.

May, R.  (1991). The cry for myth. London: W.W. Norton and Company.

McAdams, D. P. (1993). The stories we live by: Personal myths and the making of the self. New York: Guilford.

O'Brien, T.  (1990). The things they carried. New York: Penguin.

Polkinghorne, D. E. (1988). Narrative knowing and the human sciences (1st ed.). Albany, NY: State University of New York.

Ricoeur, P.  (1981). Hermeneutics and the human sciences. New York: Cambridge University.

White, M. & Epston, D.  (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. New York: W. W. Norton.

Williams, D.  (1995). The narrative impulse: Changing stories. Retrieved March 8, 2001, http://www.cgjungpage.org/articles/dwchang.html

This article is an excerpt from:

Harris, R. (2004). The eternal circle: A hermeneutic model of the heroic journey. (Unpublished master's degree thesis). Sonoma State University, Sonoma, California. (pages 99-103).