i would rather be killed tenderly like this than receive those pretencious banal approvals...the latter is sheer insult to my intelligence
and the "hurt but help"thing i'm talking about refers to Mr.Monkey's comment
point-blank revelation to the lack of intellectual insights and self- indulgence to a play-it-safe mentality
after all i'm still not honest with myself
even the research part, falls in "i wouldn't say thoroughly, but exhuastively(?) gathered materials" category..
guess i'm not the speeching type > <
very likely the graduation paper would be on widget, using the web 2.0 pets to back up my observation, if any
read several scripts for last year's CCTV cup speaking contest. general impression: trite and insincere. one or two even ended in the propoganda-like slogan "let's join hands to make the world a more harmonious place blah blah blah" like of trash...way too wooden and lightyears too high school for readers even like me
no oringinality, no wit, no challenge and no edge sensed.
even the lauguage can hardly be called flowery. floweriness has never been my cretiria of judging. yet given the emptiness of the works i would rather see them deliveres in a more view-worthy way~
the end of my cynicism today.
found ELL's OUTLOOK archive a great landfill for thoughts. dont take me wrong. this has just been a pet word lately. =v= wanted to type in the "resevoir"-like word for the "mass restoration" meaning but failed to find it...last semester's intensive reading goes to waste..again
even the "will the world be better off with fewer rare languages" was included...why didnt i find it earlier...
XQ's turning me into a devoted sexologist. lol. be frank. i probably am not the vajayjay type of female being...dont laugh! the word vajayjay has already been justified by one NYT article a couple of months ago. three cheers for GA's playwriter...looking forward to your coming-back.
back to the topic. the previous statement defines me as a potential lesbian who contempts the authority of male phallus...even though this recognition stays largely in my subconscience and remains vague all these years.
i'm rotten to the core(hopefully a hard one)...inch by inch...by the minute....
lost my voice, or rather, the desire to speak, as the shallow ones shouting at each other, their chins thrust at each other
it's fine. perfectly fine. how about you two marrying each other?? \^_^/ i'll be standing by the side of the red carpet shedding my heartfelt tears of happiness~
plz give me neat concept, not tricky jue de mots. am so fed up with ya bullsh*t...
show me things' intellectual pedigree of which i know nought
decorate my neck with pearls of profoundity
let the talk of nihility be my swan song~
see? I can be this sublime just if there's a will. mock mock
Q of the Day:
If Google=unitarianism, Wiki=Anarchy
What is Facebook?
nice entry~aha
2007年12月15日
2007年10月28日
{quote} 默.
我们很少说话，虽然很就在身边，却宁愿沉默。其实我一直都在偷偷的潜望，我关注你，是因为我曾经觉得我们很像。也许现在没有了，也许很久以前就不一样了。因为我变的更像我，而你变的更像你。可是我在暗处，还一直小心的注视，一直的想。因为我喜欢这样。虽然现在很多我看不懂，文字或者意义，但这都与喜好无关。也许你不知道，你不知道我的目光，你不知道我的思想，因为你太忙，或者只是不关注。这都没有什么关系。事情本来就是这样，由冷漠而孤独，然后抛弃掉于自己没有意义的人和事，不再分神，不再为之愁苦。我们都不排斥这种选择性的遗忘，所以我们乐于接受没有热度的现状。各自选择，各自奔向，各自死亡。所以我看到的是你的嘴角，你看到的是我的眉梢，然后我们笑，却怀揣各自的心思。不为人知，不相言语，永不再提及。我知道你攥着你所在意的幸福，而且为了这些不名的幸福拼尽了气力。在我看来他们黑暗却是甜美，而我不在其中。我不在你的幸福中。你执著，所以我不被辜负。某个瞬间我会为这样的情形而难过，但只是瞬间而已。因为我感情浓烈。可我知道你感情的稀薄，所以我知道你没有这样的瞬间。于是了了。不为人知，不相言语，永不再提及。
不为人知，不相言语，永不再提及。
不为人知，不相言语，永不再提及。
不为人知，不相言语，永不再提及呵。
可我毕竟不是勇敢的人，我不敢让你知道，又不敢让自己忘掉。所以我只能找一个你看不到的角落写些没有意义的东西。我需要我记住，只是我，只是记住。但是又不要你知道，你最好不要，永远都不要。也许全世界的小朋友都可以看到这里写满阴暗曲折的心事，但他们看不懂。我知道你明白，可你却看不到。你不会看到，因为你没有知道这些的欲望，所以你不会看到，一定不会。或许对于这件事情我过于自信了，我总是犯同样的错。
不说了，应该睡觉，或者写程序。也许就是这个时刻让我看到了我们走向了相背的方向。是的，我们本就不一样，所以我没有不开心，而你，其实也没有。我只是需要记住而已。
如果你以为看懂了，那我告诉你你错了。我说的一定不是你，也无关乎男人。我从来不觉得我会和哪个男人很相似，所以我不需要這麽费力的去记住他们。
不为人知，不相言语，永不再提及。
不为人知，不相言语，永不再提及。
不为人知，不相言语，永不再提及呵。
可我毕竟不是勇敢的人，我不敢让你知道，又不敢让自己忘掉。所以我只能找一个你看不到的角落写些没有意义的东西。我需要我记住，只是我，只是记住。但是又不要你知道，你最好不要，永远都不要。也许全世界的小朋友都可以看到这里写满阴暗曲折的心事，但他们看不懂。我知道你明白，可你却看不到。你不会看到，因为你没有知道这些的欲望，所以你不会看到，一定不会。或许对于这件事情我过于自信了，我总是犯同样的错。
不说了，应该睡觉，或者写程序。也许就是这个时刻让我看到了我们走向了相背的方向。是的，我们本就不一样，所以我没有不开心，而你，其实也没有。我只是需要记住而已。
如果你以为看懂了，那我告诉你你错了。我说的一定不是你，也无关乎男人。我从来不觉得我会和哪个男人很相似，所以我不需要這麽费力的去记住他们。
2007年5月24日
when Wilson.E meets V.Nabokov
Books of The Times
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
THE NABOKOV-WILSON LETTERS Correspondence Between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940-1971Edited, annotated and with an introductory essay by Simon Karlinsky.
When the gods clash, the earth shakes; and few bystanders on the literary scene of the 1960's failed to feel to feel the tremors when Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov collided in the pages of The New York Review of Books and Encounter magazine over Mr. Nabokov's four-volume translation, with commentary, of Pushkin's verse novel "Eugene Onegin." What made their skirmish particularly startling was that each turned as a weapon against the other their long-standing literary friendship. As Nabokov wrote, responding to Wilson's review: "I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in refraining from reviewing any of my novels. We have had many interesting talks, have exchanged many frank letters. A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language, I have always done my best to explain to him his mistakes of pronunciation, grammar and interpretation."
"The Nabokov-Wilson Letters," edited, annotated and introduced by Simon Karlinsky, professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California at Berkeley, is the written record of that friendship. It contains 264 letters, the extent remains of a correspondence that begins in the summer of 1940, with Nabokov proposing that he and Wilson meet, and ends, for all intents and purposes, in the spring of 1958, with a perfunctory exchange of summer itineraries.
Background for Rereading
In the meantime, their mutual affection flourishes. Wilson extends a helping hand to the financially hardpressed immigrant, praises his first writings in English, introduces him to editors, publishers and friends. Deeply grateful ("I feel it is you who have given me the great Push"), Nabokov encourages and nurses Wilson's burgeoning interest in Russian literature. Opinions are exchanged, favorite writers recommended, even articles of clothing borrowed. ("Dear Bunny, I am sending you the socks you lent me and a sample of my translation of Yougin One-gin.") Wilson proposes a book collaboration, lines up a publisher and arranges advances.
In short, they weren't being merely facetious when they wrote in the course of the "Onegin" exchange that they had been friends. And this volume creates an extremely rich and interesting background against which to reread that exchange (so much so that one wishes it had been included in these pages).
But why does this book matter so much by itself? Why do we read it as avidly as we do a compelling novel--and a good deal more avidly, by the way, than we did Wilson's "Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972"? Because these letters form a dialogue between two dramatically contrasting characters. Here is Wilson on the one hand, sober, tenacious, and dedicated to the social importance of literature: "Another thing," he admonishes his new friend at he start of their correspondence, "do please refrain from puns, to which I see you have a slight propensity. They are pretty much excluded from serious journalism here."
And there is Nabokov, a butterfly (equipped with a stinger) to Wilson's bulldog. "You can well imagine how strongly I disapprove of your preface" to Anton Chekhov's "Peasants and Other Stories. . ." Do you really think that Chehov is Chehov because he wrote about 'social phenomena,' 'readjustments of a new industrial middle class,' 'kulaks' and 'rising serfs' (which sounds like the seas)? I thought he wrote of the kind of things that gentle King Lear proposed to discuss in prison with his daughter. I also think that at a time when American readers are taught from high school on to seek in books 'general ideas' a critic's duty should be to draw their attention to the specific detail, to the unique image, without which--as you know as well as I do--there can be no art, no genius, no Chehov, no terror, no tenderness, and no surprise."
An Inevitable Clash
They were bound to clash. If we didn't know that they would from recalling the 1960's, we know it from Professor Karlinsky's introductory essay, in which he carefully probes their contrasting attitudes toward everything from pre-Revolutionary Russia to the differences Russian and English versification. And we know it from the growing fissures in their letters, which show Nabokov falling into jocular repetitions of his disagreements with Wilson, and Wilson grumpily declaring, "I am getting rather tired of all these topics and think we ought to start something new."
Actually, there is barely a hint in the correspondence of the explosion that eventually occurred. They continued to exchange an occasional letter right up to 1971. In Nabokov's last note, he asks Wilson to "please believe that I have long ceased to bear you a grudge for your incomprehensible incomprehension of Pushkin's and Nabokov's Onegin." In Wilson's reply, the volume's final letter, he warns that "I have included an account of my visit to you in Ithaca" in a forthcoming book. "I hope it will not again impair our personal relations (it shouldn't)." (It did.)
The rest is silence. A very fraught silence.
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
THE NABOKOV-WILSON LETTERS Correspondence Between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940-1971Edited, annotated and with an introductory essay by Simon Karlinsky.
When the gods clash, the earth shakes; and few bystanders on the literary scene of the 1960's failed to feel to feel the tremors when Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov collided in the pages of The New York Review of Books and Encounter magazine over Mr. Nabokov's four-volume translation, with commentary, of Pushkin's verse novel "Eugene Onegin." What made their skirmish particularly startling was that each turned as a weapon against the other their long-standing literary friendship. As Nabokov wrote, responding to Wilson's review: "I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in refraining from reviewing any of my novels. We have had many interesting talks, have exchanged many frank letters. A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language, I have always done my best to explain to him his mistakes of pronunciation, grammar and interpretation."
"The Nabokov-Wilson Letters," edited, annotated and introduced by Simon Karlinsky, professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California at Berkeley, is the written record of that friendship. It contains 264 letters, the extent remains of a correspondence that begins in the summer of 1940, with Nabokov proposing that he and Wilson meet, and ends, for all intents and purposes, in the spring of 1958, with a perfunctory exchange of summer itineraries.
Background for Rereading
In the meantime, their mutual affection flourishes. Wilson extends a helping hand to the financially hardpressed immigrant, praises his first writings in English, introduces him to editors, publishers and friends. Deeply grateful ("I feel it is you who have given me the great Push"), Nabokov encourages and nurses Wilson's burgeoning interest in Russian literature. Opinions are exchanged, favorite writers recommended, even articles of clothing borrowed. ("Dear Bunny, I am sending you the socks you lent me and a sample of my translation of Yougin One-gin.") Wilson proposes a book collaboration, lines up a publisher and arranges advances.
In short, they weren't being merely facetious when they wrote in the course of the "Onegin" exchange that they had been friends. And this volume creates an extremely rich and interesting background against which to reread that exchange (so much so that one wishes it had been included in these pages).
But why does this book matter so much by itself? Why do we read it as avidly as we do a compelling novel--and a good deal more avidly, by the way, than we did Wilson's "Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972"? Because these letters form a dialogue between two dramatically contrasting characters. Here is Wilson on the one hand, sober, tenacious, and dedicated to the social importance of literature: "Another thing," he admonishes his new friend at he start of their correspondence, "do please refrain from puns, to which I see you have a slight propensity. They are pretty much excluded from serious journalism here."
And there is Nabokov, a butterfly (equipped with a stinger) to Wilson's bulldog. "You can well imagine how strongly I disapprove of your preface" to Anton Chekhov's "Peasants and Other Stories. . ." Do you really think that Chehov is Chehov because he wrote about 'social phenomena,' 'readjustments of a new industrial middle class,' 'kulaks' and 'rising serfs' (which sounds like the seas)? I thought he wrote of the kind of things that gentle King Lear proposed to discuss in prison with his daughter. I also think that at a time when American readers are taught from high school on to seek in books 'general ideas' a critic's duty should be to draw their attention to the specific detail, to the unique image, without which--as you know as well as I do--there can be no art, no genius, no Chehov, no terror, no tenderness, and no surprise."
An Inevitable Clash
They were bound to clash. If we didn't know that they would from recalling the 1960's, we know it from Professor Karlinsky's introductory essay, in which he carefully probes their contrasting attitudes toward everything from pre-Revolutionary Russia to the differences Russian and English versification. And we know it from the growing fissures in their letters, which show Nabokov falling into jocular repetitions of his disagreements with Wilson, and Wilson grumpily declaring, "I am getting rather tired of all these topics and think we ought to start something new."
Actually, there is barely a hint in the correspondence of the explosion that eventually occurred. They continued to exchange an occasional letter right up to 1971. In Nabokov's last note, he asks Wilson to "please believe that I have long ceased to bear you a grudge for your incomprehensible incomprehension of Pushkin's and Nabokov's Onegin." In Wilson's reply, the volume's final letter, he warns that "I have included an account of my visit to you in Ithaca" in a forthcoming book. "I hope it will not again impair our personal relations (it shouldn't)." (It did.)
The rest is silence. A very fraught silence.
2007年5月23日
..that i am that i am and why is that..
For more than a century, researchers have been trying to work out the raw ingredients that account for personality, the sweetness and neuroses that make Anna Anna, the sluggishness and sensitivity that make Andrew Andrew. They have largely ignored the first-person explanation — the life story that people themselves tell about who they are, and why.
Stories are stories, after all. The attractive stranger at the airport bar hears one version, the parole officer another, and the P.T.A. board gets something entirely different. Moreover, the tone, the lessons, even the facts in a life story can all shift in the changing light of a person’s mood, its major notes turning minor, its depths appearing shallow.
Yet in the past decade or so a handful of psychologists have argued that the quicksilver elements of personal narrative belong in any three-dimensional picture of personality. And a burst of new findings are now helping them make the case. Generous, civic-minded adults from diverse backgrounds tell life stories with very similar and telling features, studies find; so likewise do people who have overcome mental distress through psychotherapy.
Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life — and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones.
“When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn’t that cool?” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, “The Redemptive Self.” “Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.”
Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction. People tend to remember facts more accurately if they encounter them in a story rather than in a list, studies find; and they rate legal arguments as more convincing when built into narrative tales rather than on legal precedent.
YouTube routines notwithstanding, most people do not begin to see themselves in the midst of a tale with a beginning, middle and eventual end until they are teenagers. “Younger kids see themselves in terms of broad, stable traits: ‘I like baseball but not soccer,’ ” said Kate McLean, a psychologist at the University of Toronto in Mississauga. “This meaning-making capability — to talk about growth, to explain what something says about who I am — develops across adolescence.”
Psychologists know what life stories look like when they are fully hatched, at least for some Americans. Over the years, Dr. McAdams and others have interviewed hundreds of men and women, most in their 30s and older.
During a standard life-story interview, people describe phases of their lives as if they were outlining chapters, from the sandlot years through adolescence and middle age. They also describe several crucial scenes in detail, including high points (the graduation speech, complete with verbal drum roll); low points (the college nervous breakdown, complete with the list of witnesses); and turning points. The entire two-hour session is recorded and transcribed.
In analyzing the texts, the researchers found strong correlations between the content of people’s current lives and the stories they tell. Those with mood problems have many good memories, but these scenes are usually tainted by some dark detail. The pride of college graduation is spoiled when a friend makes a cutting remark. The wedding party was wonderful until the best man collapsed from drink. A note of disappointment seems to close each narrative phrase.
By contrast, so-called generative adults — those who score highly on tests measuring civic-mindedness, and who are likely to be energetic and involved — tend to see many of the events in their life in the reverse order, as linked by themes of redemption. They flunked sixth grade but met a wonderful counselor and made honor roll in seventh. They were laid low by divorce, only to meet a wonderful new partner. Often, too, they say they felt singled out from very early in life — protected, even as others nearby suffered.
In broad outline, the researchers report, such tales express distinctly American cultural narratives, of emancipation or atonement, of Horatio Alger advancement, of epiphany and second chances. Depending on the person, the story itself might be nuanced or simplistic, powerfully dramatic or cloyingly pious. But the point is that the narrative themes are, as much as any other trait, driving factors in people’s behavior, the researchers say.
“We find that when it comes to the big choices people make — should I marry this person? should I take this job? should I move across the country? — they draw on these stories implicitly, whether they know they are working from them or not,” Dr. McAdams said.
Any life story is by definition a retrospective reconstruction, at least in part an outgrowth of native temperament. Yet the research so far suggests that people’s life stories are neither rigid nor wildly variable, but rather change gradually over time, in close tandem with meaningful life events.
Jonathan Adler, a researcher at Northwestern, has found that people’s accounts of their experiences in psychotherapy provide clues about the nature of their recovery. In a recent study presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in January, Mr. Adler reported on 180 adults from the Chicago area who had recently completed a course of talk therapy. They sought treatment for things like depression, anxiety, marital problems and fear of flying, and spent months to years in therapy.
At some level, talk therapy has always been an exercise in replaying and reinterpreting each person’s unique life story. Yet Mr. Adler found that in fact those former patients who scored highest on measures of well-being — who had recovered, by standard measures — told very similar tales about their experiences.
They described their problem, whether depression or an eating disorder, as coming on suddenly, as if out of nowhere. They characterized their difficulty as if it were an outside enemy, often giving it a name (the black dog, the walk of shame). And eventually they conquered it.
“The story is one of victorious battle: ‘I ended therapy because I could overcome this on my own,’ ” Mr. Adler said. Those in the study who scored lower on measures of psychological well-being were more likely to see their moods and behavior problems as a part of their own character, rather than as a villain to be defeated. To them, therapy was part of a continuing adaptation, not a decisive battle.
The findings suggest that psychotherapy, when it is effective, gives people who are feeling helpless a sense of their own power, in effect altering their life story even as they work to disarm their own demons, Mr. Adler said.
Mental resilience relies in part on exactly this kind of autobiographical storytelling, moment to moment, when navigating life’s stings and sorrows. To better understand how stories are built in real time, researchers have recently studied how people recall vivid scenes from recent memory. They find that one important factor is the perspective people take when they revisit the scene — whether in the first person, or in the third person, as if they were watching themselves in a movie.
In a 2005 study reported in the journal Psychological Science, researchers at Columbia University measured how student participants reacted to a bad memory, whether an argument or failed exam, when it was recalled in the third person. They tested levels of conscious and unconscious hostility after the recollections, using both standard questionnaires and students’ essays. The investigators found that the third-person scenes were significantly less upsetting, compared with bad memories recalled in the first person.
“What our experiment showed is that this shift in perspective, having this distance from yourself, allows you to relive the experience and focus on why you’re feeling upset,” instead of being immersed in it, said Ethan Kross, the study’s lead author. The emotional content of the memory is still felt, he said, but its sting is blunted as the brain frames its meaning, as it builds the story.
Taken together, these findings suggest a kind of give and take between life stories and individual memories, between the larger screenplay and the individual scenes. The way people replay and recast memories, day by day, deepens and reshapes their larger life story. And as it evolves, that larger story in turn colors the interpretation of the scenes.
Nic Weststrate, 23, a student living in Toronto, said he was able to reinterpret many of his most painful memories with more compassion after having come out as a gay man. He was very hard on himself, for instance, when at age 20 he misjudged a relationship with a friend who turned out to be straight.
He now sees the end of that relationship as both a painful lesson and part of a larger narrative. “I really had no meaningful story for my life then,” he said, “and I think if I had been open about being gay I might not have put myself in that position, and he probably wouldn’t have either.”
After coming out, he said: “I saw that there were other possibilities. I would be presenting myself openly to a gay audience, and just having a coherent story about who I am made a big difference. It affects how you see the past, but it also really affects your future.”
Psychologists have shown just how interpretations of memories can alter future behavior. In an experiment published in 2005, researchers had college students who described themselves as socially awkward in high school recall one of their most embarrassing moments. Half of the students reimagined the humiliation in the first person, and the other half pictured it in the third person.
Two clear differences emerged. Those who replayed the scene in the third person rated themselves as having changed significantly since high school — much more so than the first-person group did. The third-person perspective allowed people to reflect on the meaning of their social miscues, the authors suggest, and thus to perceive more psychological growth.
And their behavior changed, too. After completing the psychological questionnaires, each study participant spent time in a waiting room with another student, someone the research subject thought was taking part in the study. In fact the person was working for the research team, and secretly recorded the conversation between the pair, if any. This double agent had no idea which study participants had just relived a high school horror, and which had viewed theirs as a movie scene.
The recordings showed that members of the third-person group were much more sociable than the others. “They were more likely to initiate a conversation, after having perceived themselves as more changed,” said Lisa Libby, the lead author and a psychologist at Ohio State University. She added, “We think that feeling you have changed frees you up to behave as if you have; you think, ‘Wow, I’ve really made some progress’ and it gives you some real momentum.”
Dr. Libby and others have found that projecting future actions in the third person may also affect what people later do, as well. In another study, students who pictured themselves voting for president in the 2004 election, from a third-person perspective, were more likely to actually go to the polls than those imagining themselves casting votes in the first person.
The implications of these results for self-improvement, whether sticking to a diet or finishing a degree or a novel, are still unknown. Likewise, experts say, it is unclear whether such scene-making is more functional for some people, and some memories, than for others. And no one yet knows how fundamental personality factors, like neuroticism or extraversion, shape the content of life stories or their component scenes.
But the new research is giving narrative psychologists something they did not have before: a coherent story to tell. Seeing oneself as acting in a movie or a play is not merely fantasy or indulgence; it is fundamental to how people work out who it is they are, and may become.
“The idea that whoever appeared onstage would play not me but a character was central to imagining how to make the narrative: I would need to see myself from outside,” the writer Joan Didion has said of “The Year of Magical Thinking,” her autobiographical play about mourning the death of her husband and her daughter. “I would need to locate the dissonance between the person I thought I was and the person other people saw.”
Stories are stories, after all. The attractive stranger at the airport bar hears one version, the parole officer another, and the P.T.A. board gets something entirely different. Moreover, the tone, the lessons, even the facts in a life story can all shift in the changing light of a person’s mood, its major notes turning minor, its depths appearing shallow.
Yet in the past decade or so a handful of psychologists have argued that the quicksilver elements of personal narrative belong in any three-dimensional picture of personality. And a burst of new findings are now helping them make the case. Generous, civic-minded adults from diverse backgrounds tell life stories with very similar and telling features, studies find; so likewise do people who have overcome mental distress through psychotherapy.
Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life — and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones.
“When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn’t that cool?” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, “The Redemptive Self.” “Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.”
Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction. People tend to remember facts more accurately if they encounter them in a story rather than in a list, studies find; and they rate legal arguments as more convincing when built into narrative tales rather than on legal precedent.
YouTube routines notwithstanding, most people do not begin to see themselves in the midst of a tale with a beginning, middle and eventual end until they are teenagers. “Younger kids see themselves in terms of broad, stable traits: ‘I like baseball but not soccer,’ ” said Kate McLean, a psychologist at the University of Toronto in Mississauga. “This meaning-making capability — to talk about growth, to explain what something says about who I am — develops across adolescence.”
Psychologists know what life stories look like when they are fully hatched, at least for some Americans. Over the years, Dr. McAdams and others have interviewed hundreds of men and women, most in their 30s and older.
During a standard life-story interview, people describe phases of their lives as if they were outlining chapters, from the sandlot years through adolescence and middle age. They also describe several crucial scenes in detail, including high points (the graduation speech, complete with verbal drum roll); low points (the college nervous breakdown, complete with the list of witnesses); and turning points. The entire two-hour session is recorded and transcribed.
In analyzing the texts, the researchers found strong correlations between the content of people’s current lives and the stories they tell. Those with mood problems have many good memories, but these scenes are usually tainted by some dark detail. The pride of college graduation is spoiled when a friend makes a cutting remark. The wedding party was wonderful until the best man collapsed from drink. A note of disappointment seems to close each narrative phrase.
By contrast, so-called generative adults — those who score highly on tests measuring civic-mindedness, and who are likely to be energetic and involved — tend to see many of the events in their life in the reverse order, as linked by themes of redemption. They flunked sixth grade but met a wonderful counselor and made honor roll in seventh. They were laid low by divorce, only to meet a wonderful new partner. Often, too, they say they felt singled out from very early in life — protected, even as others nearby suffered.
In broad outline, the researchers report, such tales express distinctly American cultural narratives, of emancipation or atonement, of Horatio Alger advancement, of epiphany and second chances. Depending on the person, the story itself might be nuanced or simplistic, powerfully dramatic or cloyingly pious. But the point is that the narrative themes are, as much as any other trait, driving factors in people’s behavior, the researchers say.
“We find that when it comes to the big choices people make — should I marry this person? should I take this job? should I move across the country? — they draw on these stories implicitly, whether they know they are working from them or not,” Dr. McAdams said.
Any life story is by definition a retrospective reconstruction, at least in part an outgrowth of native temperament. Yet the research so far suggests that people’s life stories are neither rigid nor wildly variable, but rather change gradually over time, in close tandem with meaningful life events.
Jonathan Adler, a researcher at Northwestern, has found that people’s accounts of their experiences in psychotherapy provide clues about the nature of their recovery. In a recent study presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in January, Mr. Adler reported on 180 adults from the Chicago area who had recently completed a course of talk therapy. They sought treatment for things like depression, anxiety, marital problems and fear of flying, and spent months to years in therapy.
At some level, talk therapy has always been an exercise in replaying and reinterpreting each person’s unique life story. Yet Mr. Adler found that in fact those former patients who scored highest on measures of well-being — who had recovered, by standard measures — told very similar tales about their experiences.
They described their problem, whether depression or an eating disorder, as coming on suddenly, as if out of nowhere. They characterized their difficulty as if it were an outside enemy, often giving it a name (the black dog, the walk of shame). And eventually they conquered it.
“The story is one of victorious battle: ‘I ended therapy because I could overcome this on my own,’ ” Mr. Adler said. Those in the study who scored lower on measures of psychological well-being were more likely to see their moods and behavior problems as a part of their own character, rather than as a villain to be defeated. To them, therapy was part of a continuing adaptation, not a decisive battle.
The findings suggest that psychotherapy, when it is effective, gives people who are feeling helpless a sense of their own power, in effect altering their life story even as they work to disarm their own demons, Mr. Adler said.
Mental resilience relies in part on exactly this kind of autobiographical storytelling, moment to moment, when navigating life’s stings and sorrows. To better understand how stories are built in real time, researchers have recently studied how people recall vivid scenes from recent memory. They find that one important factor is the perspective people take when they revisit the scene — whether in the first person, or in the third person, as if they were watching themselves in a movie.
In a 2005 study reported in the journal Psychological Science, researchers at Columbia University measured how student participants reacted to a bad memory, whether an argument or failed exam, when it was recalled in the third person. They tested levels of conscious and unconscious hostility after the recollections, using both standard questionnaires and students’ essays. The investigators found that the third-person scenes were significantly less upsetting, compared with bad memories recalled in the first person.
“What our experiment showed is that this shift in perspective, having this distance from yourself, allows you to relive the experience and focus on why you’re feeling upset,” instead of being immersed in it, said Ethan Kross, the study’s lead author. The emotional content of the memory is still felt, he said, but its sting is blunted as the brain frames its meaning, as it builds the story.
Taken together, these findings suggest a kind of give and take between life stories and individual memories, between the larger screenplay and the individual scenes. The way people replay and recast memories, day by day, deepens and reshapes their larger life story. And as it evolves, that larger story in turn colors the interpretation of the scenes.
Nic Weststrate, 23, a student living in Toronto, said he was able to reinterpret many of his most painful memories with more compassion after having come out as a gay man. He was very hard on himself, for instance, when at age 20 he misjudged a relationship with a friend who turned out to be straight.
He now sees the end of that relationship as both a painful lesson and part of a larger narrative. “I really had no meaningful story for my life then,” he said, “and I think if I had been open about being gay I might not have put myself in that position, and he probably wouldn’t have either.”
After coming out, he said: “I saw that there were other possibilities. I would be presenting myself openly to a gay audience, and just having a coherent story about who I am made a big difference. It affects how you see the past, but it also really affects your future.”
Psychologists have shown just how interpretations of memories can alter future behavior. In an experiment published in 2005, researchers had college students who described themselves as socially awkward in high school recall one of their most embarrassing moments. Half of the students reimagined the humiliation in the first person, and the other half pictured it in the third person.
Two clear differences emerged. Those who replayed the scene in the third person rated themselves as having changed significantly since high school — much more so than the first-person group did. The third-person perspective allowed people to reflect on the meaning of their social miscues, the authors suggest, and thus to perceive more psychological growth.
And their behavior changed, too. After completing the psychological questionnaires, each study participant spent time in a waiting room with another student, someone the research subject thought was taking part in the study. In fact the person was working for the research team, and secretly recorded the conversation between the pair, if any. This double agent had no idea which study participants had just relived a high school horror, and which had viewed theirs as a movie scene.
The recordings showed that members of the third-person group were much more sociable than the others. “They were more likely to initiate a conversation, after having perceived themselves as more changed,” said Lisa Libby, the lead author and a psychologist at Ohio State University. She added, “We think that feeling you have changed frees you up to behave as if you have; you think, ‘Wow, I’ve really made some progress’ and it gives you some real momentum.”
Dr. Libby and others have found that projecting future actions in the third person may also affect what people later do, as well. In another study, students who pictured themselves voting for president in the 2004 election, from a third-person perspective, were more likely to actually go to the polls than those imagining themselves casting votes in the first person.
The implications of these results for self-improvement, whether sticking to a diet or finishing a degree or a novel, are still unknown. Likewise, experts say, it is unclear whether such scene-making is more functional for some people, and some memories, than for others. And no one yet knows how fundamental personality factors, like neuroticism or extraversion, shape the content of life stories or their component scenes.
But the new research is giving narrative psychologists something they did not have before: a coherent story to tell. Seeing oneself as acting in a movie or a play is not merely fantasy or indulgence; it is fundamental to how people work out who it is they are, and may become.
“The idea that whoever appeared onstage would play not me but a character was central to imagining how to make the narrative: I would need to see myself from outside,” the writer Joan Didion has said of “The Year of Magical Thinking,” her autobiographical play about mourning the death of her husband and her daughter. “I would need to locate the dissonance between the person I thought I was and the person other people saw.”
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