Narrative Truth and Theoretical Truth

A Review of Instruments for Assessing Family History

“…Inaccuracies in autobiographical memory have long been of concern in psychology, but they did not receive a great deal of attention until relatively recently. Most memory experts have concluded that autobiographical memory is reasonably accurate (see above), but there is also widespread consensus that human memory involves complex reconstructive processes that often result in distorted memory (Bartlett, 1932;Bonanno, 1990;Freud, 1899Freud, /1962Lindsay and Read, 1994;Loftus and Loftus, 1980;Schacter, 1995;Spence, 1982). General conclusions such as these are useful, but they beg a number of specific questions regarding the precise level of accuracy in childhood memory, individual differences in memory reliability, and differences in memory reliability across domains of experience (e.g., memory for discrete events compared with memory for the nature of parent-child relationships).…”

A study of personality in literary autobiography: An analysis of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel..

“…A related and supporting assumption is that the present exerts its influence on memory because of a person's need to provide his or her self with a sense of historical continuity. Moreover, when recall of age-related selves is embedded in a narrative of one's life-an autobiography-the narrative form itself also exerts a strong influence toward continuity, because a story is expected, among other things, to make meaningful connections between past, present, and future (Cohler, 1982;Gergen &Gergen, 1983Spence, 1982).…”

“…Several kinds of evidence exist for this assumption (Cohler, 1982;Eakin, 1985;Langness & Frank, 1981;Runyan, 1984;Spence, 1982). The strongest evidence is from experimental social psychology (Greenwald, 198Q;Ross & Conway, 1986).…”

Text and context: narrative, postmodernism and cybernetics

“…Narrative ideas constitute a wide and complex corpus, involving different disciplines from anthropology to psychoanalysis (Bruner, 1986;Geertz, 1973;Gergen, 1982;Mitchell, 1981;Spence, 1982). Systemic therapy entered only a particular brand of narrative, linked to social constructionism and postmodern thinking (see McNamee and Gergen, 1992).…”