DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

has, according to Booker (2005), evolved over millennia to capture some of the most
crucial dimensions of the lived human condition within a complex structure of interrelations
and meanings, and therefore is ideally placed to bring the narrative self to
light. MacIntyre similarly states that narrative is not imposed on time, but is a
structure that is present in human life:
“Surely human life has a determinate form, the form of a certain kind of story. It is
not just that poems and sagas narrate what happens to men and women, but that in
their narrative form poems and sagas capture a form that was already present in the
lives which they relate.” (MacIntyre, 1981, p.153)
Self-schemas can be paradigmatic or narrative. The aforementioned selfdefining
categories, self-descriptions, self-evaluations and possible-selves are
paradigmatic. The narrative self, on the other hand, is the cognitive space in which all
past life episodes that are defining of the self are stored and organised by time. Those
episodes that are selected from the whole life course to have prominence in the “life
story” are referred to by McAdams as “nuclear episodes”, and are generally either
“high points, low points or turning points.” (McAdams, 1993, p.296). Neisser
suggested that autobiographical memory is highly selective, and that in order to tell a
life story, a person “must gloss over vast empty spaces” (Neisser, 1994, p.15).
Autobiographical information must be stored in the selective schemas of the self
system, selectively encoded, selectively retrieved, selectively made available to
awareness and selectively disclosed to others.
Nuclear episodes are structured using narrative structures (McAdams, 1993;
Bruner, 1994; Polkinghorne, 1988). While narrative structure facilitates the
organisation of a huge amount of information into meaningful episodes, it also acts to
limit these memories and potentially distort them. Human beings are motivated to
create a coherent and meaningful life narrative and so may adapt life episode
narratives to fit into the overall dramatic theme of the life story (Cohler, 1980;
Freeman, 1984; Handel, 1987; Hankiss, 1981). Smith (1994) conducted a
longitudinal study on the transition to motherhood, and found that when
contemporaneous and retrospective accounts of pregnancy were compared, mothers
had changed their retrospective account in order to emphasise the positive elements of
the experience, a sense of self-development and improvement, and also a sense of
order and continuity. His findings suggested that the women used the selectivity of
memory to enhance and support an idealised story of motherhood in their life story.
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