The Holocaust as a Context for Telling Life Stories

2005 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian De Vries ◽  
Peter Suedfeld ◽  
Robert Krell ◽  
John A. Blando ◽  
Patricia Southard
Keyword(s):  
Life Events ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Comparison Group ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Narrative Approach ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Comparison Groups ◽  
Future Events

Using a narrative approach, this study explores the role of the Holocaust in the life stories of Survivors, contrasted with two comparison groups (one Jewish and one non-Jewish) whose direct experiences did not include surviving the Holocaust. Using the technique of the life line and measures such as number and type of life events identified, as well as the events marking the beginning and ending of the life story, several differences were found between the three groups. Survivors identified an average of 10 life events, fewer than the non-Jewish comparison group (18) but more than the Jewish comparison group (7). Most of these events were positive, although less so for the Jewish comparison group, with very few future events identified by any of the groups.

Vocational Development in Emerging Adulthood

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. Pratt ◽  
M. Kyle Matsuba
Keyword(s):  
Turning Point ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Emerging Adult ◽  
Vocational Development ◽  
Data Set ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Concepts

Chapter 6 reviews research on the topic of vocational/occupational development in relation to the McAdams and Pals tripartite personality framework of traits, goals, and life stories. Distinctions between types of motivations for the work role (as a job, career, or calling) are particularly highlighted. The authors then turn to research from the Futures Study on work motivations and their links to personality traits, identity, generativity, and the life story, drawing on analyses and quotes from the data set. To illustrate the key concepts from this vocation chapter, the authors end with a case study on Charles Darwin’s pivotal turning point, his round-the-world voyage as naturalist for the HMS Beagle. Darwin was an emerging adult in his 20s at the time, and we highlight the role of this journey as a turning point in his adult vocational development.

Incoherence matters

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-300
Author(s):  
Anselma Gallinat
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Life Events ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Story ◽  
East Germany ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
German Unification ◽  
Narrative Coherence ◽  
Value System

Life-stories are usually seen as showing considerable coherence even where they include turning points. More recent work has in contrast noted that “living” or “small narratives” do not follow this rule but contrastingly enable the pondering of unresolved life-events helping to develop understanding. This potential is particularly valuable in contexts of fundamental regime-change where changes of the value-system, such as after transition from state socialism to democracy, pose considerable challenges to narrative coherence. The article suggests reconsidering the question of coherence in life-stories and draws on two examples of individuals who experienced life in East Germany and German unification to argue that struggles for coherence in the life-story can be indicative of the lack of wider shared frameworks for the understandings of national events and historical problems.

A Biographical Case Study of a Victimizer's Daughter's Strategy: Pseudo-Identification With the Victims of the Holocaust

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriele Rosenthal ◽  
Dan Bar-On
Keyword(s):  
Life Story ◽  
Psychological Consequences ◽  
Behavioral Sciences ◽  
The Real ◽  
Repair Strategy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Working Through ◽  
The Holocaust

Abstract Previous studies have shown that many children of former Nazi perpetrators either identify with their parents by denying their atrocities, by distancing them-selves emotionally from their parents, or by acknowledging their participation in the extermination process. Through a hermeneutical case study of the narrated life story of a Euthanasia physician's daughter, a type of strategy, which we defined as pseudo-identification with the victim, is reconstructed. The results of the analysis suggest that this is a repair strategy. Putting oneself in the role of one's parents' victim provides refuge from acknowledging possible identification with Nazism and its idols, as well as identifying oneself with the real victims of one's parents. In this case, the psychological consequences of this strategy are described: The woman still suffers from extermination anxieties which block further working through of the past. (Behavioral Sciences)

Life-events and psychiatric disorders Part 1: some methodological issues

1973 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. W. Brown ◽  
F. Sklair ◽  
T. O. Harris ◽  
J. L. T. Birley
Keyword(s):  
Measurement Error ◽  
Life Events ◽  
Comparison Group ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
Negative Results ◽  
Methodological Procedures ◽  
Psychiatric Conditions ◽  
Group 2 ◽  
Depressive Patients

SynopsisThe paper focuses on recent criticisms of the study of the role of life-events in the onset of psychiatric conditions and suggests that measurement error and bias can be reasonably well controlled by various methodological procedures. Failure to comply with these may be expected, however, to increase rather than decrease the chances of establishing a ‘positive’ resuit. Three further factors to do with the design of studies and the analysis of data are discussed which are likely to mask real differences between patient and comparison group, and which therefore might explain the ‘negative’ results reported in the literature. They concern: (1) the choice of an appropriate comparison group; (2) specification of the length of the period between event and onset; and (3) specification of the event in terms of some measure of severity. Results from two London studies of schizophrenic and depressive patients are presented to illustrate the argument. The studies suggest that life-events do play an important causal role in bringing about both disorders.

Mother and friends in a Holocaust life story

2002 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
DEBORAH SCHIFFRIN
Keyword(s):  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
Reported Speech ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Memory Concerns

Although oral histories about the Holocaust are increasingly important sources of public commemoration, as well as data for historians, they also provide opportunities for survivors to recount life stories that describe intensely personal and painful memories. One type of memory concerns relationships with significant and familiar “others.” By analyzing the linguistic construction (through variation in the use of referring terms and reported speech) of two relationships (with mother and friends) in one Holocaust survivor's life story, this article shows how survivors' life stories position “others” within both their own lives and more broadly construed matrices of cultural archetypes and historically contingent identities (victim, survivor, bystander).

A New Way of Teaching Criminology for Investigation and Trial: A Narrative-Based Approach

2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 75-89
Author(s):  
Giulia Schioppetto ◽  
Marco Monzani ◽  
Silvio Ciappi
Keyword(s):  
Life Stories ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Criminal Liability ◽  
Team Work ◽  
Narrative Approach ◽  
Forensic Application ◽  
The World ◽  
Essential Contribution ◽  
Trial Phase

AbstractThe narrative-based approach acts as the only tool capable of creating and assigning a meaning to individual life stories, linking individuals to their actions. The use of narrative as a reference frame for understanding the motive of the crime therefore offers an innovative perspective into criminology and its forensic application. Through the stories of the criminals and the victims, of society, and the world of justice as a whole, doing narrative criminology means listening to and accurately analysing criminal life stories to shed some light and meaning on the obscure elements of reality that from time to time take shape as a violent act. After a review of the most recent literature in the criminological narrative area, the present work analyses the role of the criminologist as an expert who provides an essential contribution during investigation and trial phases. Moreover, the work proposes the use of a narrative approach and the contribution of a narrative criminologist in two different moments of the criminal procedure: during the investigation phase, through a preventive methodological narrative training of forensic experts, with emphasis on team work, and in the trial phase through the use of criminological interviews to assess criminal liability and dangerousness.

Narratives in Health Care

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-76
Author(s):  
Isabella Sarto-Jackson ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Biopsychosocial Model ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Healthcare Professionals ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Medical Model ◽  
Narrative Approach ◽  
Everyday Language ◽  
Narrative Approaches ◽  
Therapeutic Tools

The role of narratives in clinical practice has long been underappreciated. This disregard is largely due to an overemphasis on reductionist interpretations of disease causes based on the primacy of the medical model of disease. This way of thinking has led to decontextualizing symptoms of disorders from patients’ lives. More recently, however, healthcare professionals have turned towards a biopsychosocial model that reintroduces sociocultural and psychosocial aspects into clinical diagnosis and treatment. To this end, narrative approaches have been increasingly explored as alternative diagnostic and therapeutic tools. Central to the narrative approach is the avoidance of pathologizing language that usually focuses on deficiencies. Instead, patients’ narratives are co-constructed and co-created together with the clinician or therapist to transform them into empowering stories about healing. To make narratives accessible and transformable for the patient, psychoeducational methods can be used to translate scientific and medical knowledge about the disease into stories described in everyday language that resonate with the patient’s own life stories. Consequently, psychoeducational narratives enhance the patient’s competence in coping with a physical or mental illness and re-contextualizing symptoms, and prompt an increased compliance with therapies.

A Lifetime of Events: Age and Gender Variations in the Life Story

1996 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian de Vries ◽  
David Watt
Keyword(s):  
Life Events ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Early Adulthood ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
Older Adulthood ◽  
Significant Life ◽  
Future Events ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Life Course

This study adopted a structural perspective in the examination of life events in the context of an individual's life story. Ten men and ten women at each of three age groups (young, middle-aged, and older adulthood) identified, on a time line, personally significant life events from their past and anticipated future. Results indicated that women identified a greater number of life events and reported a younger age corresponding to their first event than did men; this was especially true for older women. Older participants, in general, identified fewer future events than did younger participants and reported an older age for their last event; the corresponding range of time covered from the first to the last event was also longer. Event type also varied by age and gender. Recency played a central role in the allocation of life events, although late adolescence and early adulthood were especially dense event periods for all groups. Discussion focuses on the roles of gender, age, and the life course in the ways in which events are configured in the life story.

scholarly journals Subjective Ontology and the Individual’s Lifeworld

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
E.E. Sapogova
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Life Events ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
The Core ◽  
Self Development ◽  
Life Journey ◽  
Life Path ◽  
The Individual

The author proposes an interpretation of the core role of subjective ontology in the formation of the individual’s lifeworld. It is shown that the actual implementation of the life journey obliges the person to think ontologically, explaining to oneself, basing on the accumulated experience, how the reality is arranged, and building a version of the causes and consequences of his own existence in it. Solving the tasks of self-development and constructing personal life stories, the individual relies upon some ultimate ontologemes (‘fate’, ‘fortuity’, ‘free will’), each of which generates different foci of interpretation of self-experience and defines the individual semantics of possible life events: if the ontology of free will dominates, then self-interpretation is built primarily as an explanation of human deeds; if the person believes in the predetermination of everything by fate, then life fulfillment would be in the focus of his/her consciousness; if everything is dominated by the fortuity, then life is perceived as a set of unpredictable incidents. The assimilated ultimate ontologemes stimulate the prevalence in self-interpretation of one of the mental processes (belief, thinking, intuition) and thus set three possible frames for the interpretation of the life path: fate — fulfillment — belief; fortuity — incident — intuition; free will — deed — thinking. The lifeworld is represented as a pyramid whose top is formed by subjective ontology that performs a system-forming function in relation to it, and its facets are its epistemological, axiological, praxeological and symbolic dimensions.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document