- Image by mrittenhouse via Flickr
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by stories. I grew up with great story tellers and I know I am shaped by my grandfather’s stories as well as my own. Early on I became fascinated by how stories were told and who told them and thus my career path was shaped. Since coming to the Family Foundation School, I have learned how important shaping our story and telling our story are to the recovery process.
If I were still in that professorial part of my life where I wrote pretensions literary essays, I would title these remarks, “Telling ourselves: the construction of narrative as the construction of self.” What I mean by the construction of self? Isn’t the self just there a given of nature? Without giving a long philosophic set of references that would run through all the greats of Existentialist philosophy and continue until today, I want to argue that our “Self” is a construction and that the basic building blocks of that construction are the ways we explain the seeming random events of this life. Self is, in part, the way we make causal connections to the outside world.
This sense of causality is also at the heart of narrative. As the British novelist E. M Forester wrote; “The king died. The queen died is not a story. The king died: the Queen died of grief is a story.” It is this insistence on a cause that links random events that creates narrative.
If we think about how we educate children and the role popular culture plays in our lives, we will see that this is not a radical idea. The teaching of language and writing through the reading of stories is a not so subtle method of getting small children to grasp the idea of causality without explaining it to them.When they get to a science or a math class where they need to articulate rules about causes, the basic idea is already there imbedded through years of hearing, watching, and reading stories.
Additionally stories give us patterns of behavior, judgments on right and wrong, ideals to aspire to, and ways to discuss our feelings by discussing characters. Who has not pretended to be Superman, Wonder Woman, or my favorite childhood super hero—Plastic Man? In short through our culture’s narratives we learn how to examine our life and how to construct a self. Some anthropologists would argue that a culture’s narratives set the pattern and limits of the self in that society.
Story telling then and story reading are essential parts of education. They are also I think essential parts of maturation and recovery.
(continued here.)
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