LA NARRAZIONE AUTOBIOGRAFICA E IL FUNZIONAMENTO DEL SÉ

ABSTRACT
In the last decades, both cognitive and personality researchers and different-oriented
therapists and clinicians have converged on the powerful role that narrative memory plays,
as anchoring aspect of personality and identity. Many studies have demonstrated that
spontaneous self defining memories (Singer & Salovey, 1993; Blagov & Singer, 2004) evoked
and provoked in clinical setting can provide valuable information for assessment about
repetitive themes and recurrent patterns of feelings linked to ongoing goals or conflicts that
are central to the individual. However, the work still leaves open the question of how human
beings think in this manner and how personal memories, spontaneously evoked during the
clinical interview, are useful for personality assessment and case conceptualization. The
present study intended to pursue three goals. First, the aim was to introduce and to
demonstrate reliability and validity of the Coding System for Autobiographical Memory
Narratives in Psychotherapy (Singer & Bonalume, 2008) for identifying and coding
autobiographical memory narratives in clinical interview. The study demonstrates good inter-
rater reliability and the utility of the coding system. Consequentially, we aimed to
investigate, first the relationship among autobiographical memories dimensions, as content,
specificity, meaning making and emotional tone, and the relationship between these
memories dimensions and patient’s self and personality functioning, evaluated with clusters
of indexes, according to the Exner’s Comprehensive System for Rorschach (Exner, 2003).The
autobiographical memories during semi-structured clinical interviews for bio-psycho-social
data recollection and Rorschach responses of 30 patients were recollected. The Coding
System for Autobiographical Memory Narratives in Psychotherapy (Singer & Bonalume,
2008), the Classification and Scoring System for Self-defining Autobiographical Memories
(Singer e Blagov, 2001) and for Content (Thorne & McLean, 2001), the linguistic analysis by
software CM (Mergenthaler, 1999) and Exner’s Comprehensive System for Rorschach (2003)
were used. The results demonstrated that a strong negative association existed between
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