“My broken chrysalis”: Narrative processes in Woolf’s autobiographical writings of sexual trauma.

Abstract

Narrating stories is the means by which persons struggle to create meaning. In the case of trauma, creation of meaning is a hard and complicated task, and narratives may remain disrupted and incomplete. In 3 autobiographical writings, 2 of which were delivered as speeches to a friendly audience, English author Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) revealed a sexual trauma caused by 1 of her half-brothers, George Duckworth, in her early adulthood. In the present psychobiography study, using narrative inquiry, we sought to examine the narrative processes in Virginia Woolf's storytelling of her traumatic experience as she struggled to create meaning. The analysis showed that, Virginia Woolf: (a) structured her texts by placing trauma revelation as the end point in her first narration, and as a necessary deviation prior to the main story in her second narration; (b) used a range of narrative strategies to moderate emotion; and (c) constructed the trauma story around 2 intertwined themes in an effort to understand characters and motives. Like many victims of sexual or physical abuse, Virginia Woolf found it difficult to associate affect to her descriptions. This difficulty, of which she became painfully aware at the end of her struggle, proved to be an important obstacle in completing her trauma narrative and in creating satisfactory meaning out of her experience. Several clinical implications are discussed on the grounds that a psychobiography study is essentially a case formulation which can inform clinical work.

The promises of qualitative research revisited: 10 years of Qualitative Psychology.

“…We find, for example, explications of intuitive inquiry (6:3), discourse analysis (1:2; 7:3), the listening guide (2:1; 8:2), mobile methods (Hammond & Cooper, 2016; Versey, 2022), and qualitative metasynthesis (Ma et al, 2015). Contributions to the journal also expanded the range of data sources of relevance to psychological inquiry, including archives (4:1), autobiographical writings (Androutsopoulou, 2021), and personal documents (6:1), including marginalia (3:2). Every method of research, from the experiment to participant observation, adds to the potentials of psychological inquiry.…”