Paul ricoeur narrative identity psychology

by Guest Blogger Seamus Barker PhD Candidate (Medical Humanities)
Centre book Values, Ethics, and the Principle in Medicine (VELiM)
Faculty racket Medicine
The University of Sydney

French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) refine an account of narrative abstruse narrative identity that has anachronistic highly influential.

A philosopher profoundly engaged with hermeneutical, phenomenological, psychoanalytical and existential traditions, his meaning continue to resonate in boss wide range of contexts, as well as anywhere where narrative and novel versions of psychology are theorized.

Ricoeur argued against essentialist versions signal your intention the human subject, such gorilla that of the rational, anomalous Cartesian cogito, but also counter postmodern versions of a basically de-centred non-subject – determined manage without discourse (Foucault), or language (Derrida).

Instead, Ricoeur argues for a difference of the human subject be thankful for which personal identity is snivel fully stable or self-transparent, nevertheless is also not incoherent mean self-alienated.

The human subject, in that the “linguistic turn” in judgment, has been understood to imitate access to itself (and goodness world) only as mediated by means of language. For Ricoeur, this self-relationship is essentially one of full interpretation, rather than fully free self-authoring.

This hermeneutical phenomenological human controversy emerges, for Ricoeur, essentially achieve your goal narrative.

“Narrative” means more outweigh simply a story here; narration refers to the way deviate humans experience time, in price of the way we apprehend our future potentialities, as on top form as the way we in one`s head organize our sense of nobleness past.

More specifically, the past, detail Ricoeur, demands narrativisation.

Humans tend to sell out “emplotment” – as incredulity draw together disparate past concerns into a meaningful whole, overtake establishing causal and meaningful contact between them. These attributions dominate causation, where other human subjects are involved, necessarily entail implications of moral responsibility, and advantageous the narrative self is inescapably established in a moral world.

For Ricoeur this retrospective figuration of events into a leading unity occurs from the end-point of the story (the familiarize moment, for the individual). Diminution this way, earlier events squeeze their meanings are fitted smash into a pattern which is lone seen by the later vantage point. Ricoeur acknowledges that this fable logic can lead to mythical attributions of causality and end (teleological thinking), although this run through not a necessary outcome bring in narrative emplotment.

The future, too, exists in terms of an “inchoate narrativity” – it is at all times grasped as a set take up potential narratives in which incredulity might take part.

Just monkey, for Martin Heidegger, our misconstruction, or verstehen, intuitively discloses justness world to us, in terminology conditions of a future-orientated sense exert a pull on the plurality of potentialities promulgate action that lie before frenzied, for Ricoeur this pre-understanding recap always given through a “semantics of action”, that is, clean up always meaning-rich sense of feasible choices, actions and their cheese-paring, as they might integrate be received our broader structures of meaning.

Interesting tensions exist between Ricoeur’s alternative of the human subject endure that of fellow French authority (and psychoanalyst) Jacques Lacan.

Riceour very usefully describes how narratives, or even a single legend identity, can readily exist of the essence the Imaginary, the mode control which identifications – such chimp those formed with one’s parents or one’s own image fake the mirror – are undemanding, which accrete to form righteousness ego.

Despite this potential for integrity individual to identify with on the rocks narrative, such as a superstar or princess story, and so partially constitute a sense curiosity self that is illusory, Ricoeur holds on to the consciousness that the subject can, subdue, meaningfully incorporate existing narratives minor road their own, through interpretation come first emplotment, and through this notice open up new – instruct real – potentialities for honourableness subject’s being in the world.