The Role and Structure of Personal Narratives

A commonly held view in psychotherapy is that people’s past experiences, their present feelings and knowledge, and their expectations about the future, exert a powerful influence on their actions. What is usually left unspecified is the cognitive process by which these influences take place. Findings in experimental research, reviewed in the present article, suggest that a central component of this process is the construction of complex and partly subjective mental representations of one’s experiences, feelings, and goals. These representations form the basis for subsequent behavior and therefore are, implicitly or explicitly, targets of therapeutic intervention. This article describes structural and functional properties of people’s mental representations of real-life events, emphasizing their narrative and causal nature, as well as the conditions under which deliberate intervention is most likely to change people’s representations. Developmental differences are considered with respect to both topics. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for adult and child psychotherapy.