Life history and life story: The interrelation between experience, remembering and narrating

Abstract

How do people show themselves regarding their life history in the present of the narration or the writing, and to what extent is this presentation constituted by experiences in the past? I would like to further develop these questions based on the Gestalt theory and on phenomenology, regarding the dialectical relation among experiencing, remembering and narrating. The present, that is to say, both the current constellation of the life history, the social discourses operating in the present, and the current interaction situation, constitutes a retrospective look on the past, the recollection process, the way memories are presented and the way they are expressed in the communication process. Still, the construction of the past that takes place in the present is in a dependency relation with the experienced past; it is not independent from the past experiences. In order to understand the fundamental differences between the present and the past perspectives, a specific methodological reflection and a controlled methodological procedure are necessary. This is done by focusing on the reconstruction of past experiences which makes possible to approach the experienced past, based on a single case. The methodological procedure here discussed rejects the assumption of a homology between experience and narration
(see Rosenthal, 1995).