“Who am I?”- 9
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Self as storyteller. To understand narrative as a form of discourse and an organizing
principle for self, it will be useful to introduce Bruner’s (1990) concept of folk psychology. He
describes folk psychology “as a system by which people organize their experience in, knowledge
about and transactions with the social world” (Bruner, 1990, p. 35). For Bruner (1990), folk
psychology is largely driven by narrative, and narratives are constructed when the canonical
assumptions of folk psychology (“how life should be”) are violated. However, because an
individual’s identity and cultural membership rests on his/her ability to explain deviations from
the canonical norm, narratives are also constructed in response so that departures from the norms
are interpreted as meaningful. Narratives are important for explaining both the extraordinary
(Bruner, 1990; Goffman, 1974) and the ordinary (Bruner, 1990; Bruner & Lucariello, 1989;
Mandelbaum, 1987, in press; Nelson, 1989a, 1989b; Sacks, 1984) communicative events, and
how self is constructed within these stories.
Bruner (1990) claims that individuals have a “readiness for meaning,” by which he means
that we are equipped with a primitive version of folk psychology, that enables us to organize the
social world through narrative (p. 72). In the work done with Emily, an infant who talked to
herself when she was alone in her crib, Bruner and Lucariello (1989) found that she developed
language, particularly her ability to construct and use narratives, as a result of an increasing need
to organize and participate in a social-cultural world; Emily was interested in ordering her
experience not to determine causality but to situate herself within social relationships and
activities. As Nelson (1989b) proposed, Emily was able to construct her sense of self through
the use of objective (I, we) and subjective pronouns (me, Emmy) because she developed the
ability to see herself both in terms of self and other and reorganized her use of language
(heightened her use of I and me and abandoned using Emmy to refer to herself) to account for
Convention