Personal Histories |
ABSTRACT To the extent that histories are stories with which we identify, they are configurations. In this context, the history of the world becomes an extension of our life story. There are several basic distinctions that need to be made about "the story of one's life": personal anecdotes, autobiographies, biographies, and personal histories. An autobiographical narrative is an account of our life story. The phrase, "life story," is used as a technical term in psychology to refer to data collected about people's accounts of their lives. The more comprehensive life story is what Randall calls the "inside story." Our term for the "inside story" is "personal history." |
There is a well-known passage in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in which Stephen Dedalus locates his place in the world--Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College, Sallins County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe. As Stephen's geographic account of himself suggests, we locate our personal histories at least in the history of the world if not the history of the universe. Though we may read numerous histories, in the last analysis they exist in our memory systems as a set of interrelated locations that constitute our life story. More accurately, our life stories are embedded in the history of the world.
Because personal histories are about us, we cannot not identify with them. Hence, they are configurations--the story of us in the world that we configure for ourselves. The centerpiece is the life story.
[History as a Configuration] [Some Distinctions] [Autobiographical Narratives]
[Life Stories] [Inside Story] [Personal History]
In his The Stories We are: An Essay in Self Creation, William Lowell Randall distinguishes among four levels of "the story of my life":
When I refer to 'the story of my life,' I may be making a number of associations in my mind all at once: [level 1] the events of my life themselves (whether minor or main); [level 2] my memories of those events (which may.be quite a different matter); [level 3] the autobiography I might eventually write; [level 4] or the biography I hope (or fear) someone else might write of me. Or I may be thinking of certain overall patterns I have remarked in my relationships or my life as a whole. Doubtless, I seldom make any one of these associations exclusively. They are frequently mingled, …
From the perspective of configuring the third and fourth levels are important are most likely to become public:
… The Inside-Out Story
… If my inside story is focused most intensely in my autobiographical memory, then my inside-out story attains its sharpest shape in some form of an actual autobiography — from keeping a journal to writing my memoirs — or in some combination of the many other ways in which, intentionally or not, I express to others what is going on inside of me: from the possessions I own, to the words I speak, to the lines upon my face; indeed, from my day-to-day actions and involvements to the whole spread of my accomplishments and achievements, [p55] or lack thereof.
… The Outside-In Story
The fourth and final level on which we can understand 'the story of my life' is one to which I have already alluded. It is the level of impression, the level of the stories that are entertained about me outside-in, that are 'read' into my life by all those who know me or encounter me in any way. It is 'my life' in the sense of what is made of me by others. It is my 'life-history' in the sense of what is told of me by others (Kaufman, 1987, 21; Runyan, 1984). If the sharpest focus of my inside-out story is my autobiography, then that of my outside-in story would be my biography — assuming only one can be written. Short of my 'official' biography, that is, there can be numerous such renderings of the story of my life, from the concept of me held by my most casual acquaintance, to the crisply worded case history compiled on me by a doctor or social worker, analyst or judge, to the flowery-phrased eulogy delivered upon my death. [p57]
Randall's inside-out and outside-in stories distinguish between autobiographical and biographical narratives. With respect to configuring, his second level, memories is the one that expresses the configuration we create as the pattern of our lives which can be termed, a personal history.
We all are capable of remembering our past lives. We have episodic/autobiographical memories where the events of our past are stored. When we recount an episode from our past, we call this discourse a "personal anecdote." When we string together the events in our lives, we tell others our life stories. If we wrote down from memory the events in our lives we are willing to share, we compose an autobiography. If someone else writes about the events of our life, he or she composes our biography. How does a personal history differ from these other types of narratives about us? Whereas the other narratives have other persons as their audiences, we are the audience to our personal histories. They are what we believe we have in fact done during our life times.
[History as a Configuration] [Some Distinctions] [Autobiographical Narratives]
[Life Stories] [Inside Story] [Personal History]
Autobiographical stories are the narratives we tell in the first person about the events of our lives as we remember them. Often the stories are told in part from time to time as anecdotes. Autobiographical stories are based on real-world memories of personal events. (Ashcraft, Fundamentals of Cognition 227ff) But, as Aronson notes in some detail, autobiographical memories are as well as “recovered memories” (memories of traumatic events that have been repressed) are not usually accurate. In addition, there are many instances of “false memories” in which person invent their past. (Aronson, Social Psychology, et. al., 1999, 177-79).
The key difference between a personal history and an autobiographical narrative is that the later are much more selective and typically leave out the unflattering events in our lives.
[History as a Configuration] [Some Distinctions] [Autobiographical Narratives]
[Life Stories] [Inside Story] [Personal History]
The phrase "life story," despite its simplicity, is actually a technical term in psychological research. Life stories are data collected by researchers from interviews. The Foley Center at Northwestern specializes in life story research. Its web site notes that:
In the last 15-20 years, the social sciences have witnessed a strong upsurge of interest in narrative and stories as they apply to human lives and social relationships. Narrative methods have proliferated in many fields, and psychological theorists such as Jerome Bruner and Theodore Sarbin have emphasized the storied nature of human lives and human conduct. Beginning with his 1985 book, Power, Intimacy, and the Life Story, Dan P. McAdams has developed a life-story model of adult identity. According to the model, people living in modern societies begin to organize their lives in narrative terms in late adolescence and young adulthood. People create internalized and evolving life stories that serve to reconstruct the past and anticipate the future in ways that provide their lives with some degree of unity and purpose. McAdams has argued that what Erik Erikson called "ego identity" is largely a personal narrative that situates a person in a particular psychosocial niche in the modern world. Like other literary constructions, life stories may be analyzed in terms of plots, settings, scenes, characters, and themes.
[History as a Configuration] [Some Distinctions] [Autobiographical Narratives]
[Life Stories] [Inside Story] [Personal History]
Randall's description of what he calls the "inside story" is as follows:
On the second level, experience, the whole story of my life begins to become accessible to me. It becomes accessible, though, not as that story in itself but only as it is taken up within me and interpreted by me. It is 'my life' in the sense suggested by the platitude 'life is what you make it.' ... It is the realm of what cognitive scientists call autobiographical memory (Rubin, 1986). According to Ulrich Neisser, such memory 'consists of events that we have personally experienced – or ... of our personal experiences of events' (1986, 71). It is the level of what Glover calls my inner story. The inner story is the sum total not of what actually happened but only of my memories or impressions of it, the total not of events per se but only of events I have personally experienced. 'Experienced' is the key. It implies that I have subjected those events to some sort of process; that I have worked on them in some sort of manner, attended to them, noticed them; that somewhere within me I have filed them away for future reference; or that, as we say, I have 'learned' from them. It implies that, in the very least, I have done something to them, in what psychologist Robert Kegan describes as 'that most human of "regions" between an event and a reaction to it – the place where the event is privately composed, made sense of, the place where it actually becomes an event for that person' (1982, 2).
Whereas the whole story is the objective or outside story, then, the inner story is the inside story: the story of my life as I have internalized or digested it, the 'real, inmost story' (Sacks, 1985, 105), the subjective story that I alone can tell. The inside story is what I make of the outside story; indeed, it is all I can make of the outside story, all I can know of it. It is based on the outside story – that is, I may (naively) assume it to be a fairly accurate representation of it – but the relationship between the two is problematic. In fact, inside and outside are often at odds. There is a curious gap between them, yet one from which spring those very features of our humanness that make us the fascinating species we are: our secrecy, our self-deception, our hypocrisy, our humour, our irony, our insanity, our feelings and fears, even our capacity for thought itself. The inside story is to the outside story, we could say, what science is to nature, or what religion is to God, or what art is to life. The inside story is my creation. It is what I make in my mind and my heart out of the raw material of my existence. It is the product of my imagination – which reconstitutes the raw events of my life as rememberable experiences. Taking these events-turned experiences as a whole, the inside story is simply my 'experience.'
(50-51)
An important point to keep in mind is that the inside story is "the realm of what cognitive scientists call autobiographical memory" but is not an autobiography.
[History as a Configuration] [Some Distinctions] [Autobiographical Narratives]
[Life Stories] [Inside Story] [Personal History]
In Randall's account, the "inside story" " becomes accessible, though, not as that story in itself but only as it is taken up within me and interpreted by me." It is the story of my life known only to me. Though it may be the basis of my autobiography, it is more comprehensive than my autobiography.
The phrase "personal history" is used on the C-CS web site to refer to the fact that persons are aware of all the events in their past that can be remembered. These memories are "personal" and usually kept private. The idea of a personal history refers to the circumstance that persons hold beliefs about what they have done in the past. They may tell an anecdote about themselves to illustrate some personal quality they wish to communicate to someone while leaving out some significant details about the event because they are embarrassing. As in all autobiographical narratives, the events that constitute personal histories are not necessarily accurate. Nonetheless, they are memory records what persons believe happened. They do not express what happened but what we believe happened.
When the history of the world is attached in our memory systems to our personal history, it constitutes the sum of what we believe about the world in which we live, that is, it constitutes our world view.
jjs
[History as a Configuration] [Some Distinctions] [Autobiographical Narratives]
[Life Stories] [Inside Story] [Personal History]
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last revised:
June 11, 2010
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