Memories under construction: Writing, narratives and dialogues

Abstract

This paper examines the role of writing in the context of the narrative construction of our memories, proposing this as the dialogical reconstruction of our past into our present. To do this, we will draw from Cultural Psychology, and from Narrative Psychology, focusing on the relationship between writing and narrative in the representation of autobiographical memory. The narrative representations of our memory convey specific images of our former self, affects associated to them, meanings, and interpretations that organise our subjective contents into versions of what happened and what it meant. Bearing on this, we will analyse Childhood (1984), the autobiography of the French writer N. Sarraute, to discuss the dynamics of this process exploring how memory mobilises different narrative versions, and can provoke tensions related to individual and sociocultural factors. Our focus will be on the participation of writing in this process, proposing that it acts both as the mediator of the dialogical negotiation of tensions and as the space where the narrative dynamics of memory take place. Narratives are presented as the organisation of this tension that results in the representations of autobiographical memories which, we propose, are to be seen as under construction.

Culture & Psychology: 25 Constructive years

“…Bartlett-type re-confabulation takes place in the process of filling in that border space. Cabillas (2014) shows how that distancing happens in making of autobiographical memory.…”

Autobiographies in Organizational Research

“…By providing a timeline of individuals’ lives, autobiographies lay out a story that explains how life events unfolded over time. Cabillas (2014), in analyzing the autobiography of French writer Nathalie Sarraute, proposes that the autobiography provides a temporal frame that captures the dynamic actions and reactions stemming from critical narrative events. The process of writing about these narrative events, she argues, does not simply involve retrieving stories from the past but developing emerging realities that are influenced by the dynamics between the time of the event and the time of writing (Cabillas, 2014, p. 314).…”

“…Cabillas (2014), in analyzing the autobiography of French writer Nathalie Sarraute, proposes that the autobiography provides a temporal frame that captures the dynamic actions and reactions stemming from critical narrative events. The process of writing about these narrative events, she argues, does not simply involve retrieving stories from the past but developing emerging realities that are influenced by the dynamics between the time of the event and the time of writing (Cabillas, 2014, p. 314). Within the criminology literature, Presser (2009) advocates the use of autobiographic accounts, or “narrative criminology,” because of their vast potential to explain why crime occurs.…”

Functional reality of the quasi-real: Gegenstandstheorie and cultural psychology today

“…Anna Karenina both exists (as a character fully created by Lev Tolstoy and accepted as such by readers-on the pages of the novel) and does not exist (as a real person -Eco, 2009;Valsiner, 2009d). Cabillas (2014) gives us examples of Natalie Saraute autobiographical writing that gives us an interesting insight into the making of such quasi-existing objects.…”

“…Psychology might be a form of literature-and literature is a form of scientific psychology, without the efforts to publicly prove that it is ''hard science.'' Saraute's autobiography of writing (Cabillas, 2014) is a good example of how the activity of writing itself takes place at the present (here-and-now)-yet, its function is to activate and integrate the constructively remembered past and link it with imagined future. The writing process is itself an activity of constructive remembering (Bartlett, 1932;Wagoner, 2012) and gives us an access to the construction of narrative trajectories.…”