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Die Psychologie unterscheidet interpersonelle Konflikte – also Konflikte zwischen verschiedenen Personen – von intrapsychischen Konflikten – also Konflikten, die sich innerhalb einer Person abspielen. Psychotherapeutisch behandelt werden können Konflikte, wenn alle Konfliktparteien anwesend sind und angesprochen werden können. Insofern kann die Psychoanalyse einzelner Personen vor allem bei intrapsychischen Konflikten helfen, die nach unserem Verständnis psychischen Problemen und Störungen zugrunde liegen. Interpersonelle Konflikte können von Psychotherapeuten in Paar- oder Familientherapien angegangen werden.
Self-narratives of patients have received increasing interest in schizophrenia since they offer unique material to study patients’ subjective experience related to their illness, in particular the alteration of self that accompanies schizophrenia. In this study, we investigated the life narratives and the ability to integrate and bind memories of personal events into a coherent narrative in 27 patients with schizophrenia and 26 controls. Four aspects of life narratives were analyzed: coherence with cultural concept of biography, temporal coherence, causal-motivational coherence and thematic coherence. Results showed that in patients cultural biographical knowledge is preserved, whereas temporal coherence is partially impaired. Furthermore, causal-motivational and thematic coherence are significantly impaired: patients have difficulties explaining how events have modeled their identity, and integrating different events along thematic lines. Impairment of global causal-motivational and thematic coherence was significantly correlated with patients’ executive dysfunction, suggesting that cognitive impairment observed in patients could affect their ability to construct a coherent narrative of their life by binding important events to their self. This study provides new understanding of the cognitive deficits underlying self-disorders in patients with schizophrenia. Our findings suggest the potential usefulness of developing new therapeutic interventions to improve autobiographical reasoning skills.
Objective: Although meaning making and specifically autobiographical reasoning are expected to relate to well‐being, findings tend to be mixed. Attempts at meaning making do not always lead to meaning made. We aimed to disentangle these complex relationships and also explore the role of level of education.
Method: Ninety participants (mean age 36.73 years, SD = 7.27; 74.4% women, 25.6% men) who had experienced the loss of a parent through death, going missing, or Alzheimer's disease narrated this loss, a sad, a turning point, and a self‐defining memory, and completed questionnaires assessing depression, trauma symptoms, and protracted grief. Three aspects of autobiographical reasoning (quantity, valence, and change‐relatedness of self‐event connections) were related to meaning made (sophistication of meaning making) and symptom level.
Results: Years of education correlated both with positive implications of autobiographical reasoning and with meaning made. The quantity, positivity, and change‐relatedness of attempts at meaning making (self‐event connections) predicted accomplished meaning made, and positivity alone predicted less prolonged grief.
Conclusions: Adapting the life story after a loss such that change of the self is acknowledged and positive change can be constructed helps finding meaning and lowering protracted grief. These changes in narrative identity are supported by more years of education.
An individualized and coherent life story has been described as the form of identity that is required by highly mobile individualistic Western societies, whereas more family-oriented, traditional societies require more role-based, synchronic identities. Therefore in individualistic cultures entire life narratives can be expected to be more coherent and to contain more autobiographical arguments that contribute to life narrative coherence. This cultural group difference is expected to be mediated by individuals’ conformity to their respective cultural normative concept of biography, such that more conformity leads to less life narrative coherence and fewer autobiographical arguments. We tested these expectations by eliciting entire life narratives and cultural life scripts from four different cultural groups of students of technical universities: from provincial Karabük and from metropolitan Istanbul in Turkey, as well as from students with a Turkish migrant and with a native German background from urban Frankfurt am Main, Germany (N = 96). Expectations were confirmed for global life narrative coherence and autobiographical arguments with self-event connections. Conformity with a normative concept of biography indeed partially mediated cultural influences on life narrative coherence. Life narratives from Turkey also contained more family-related events and, unexpectedly, were more negative. Thus creating a coherent life narrative is more typical for cultures that require autonomous, individualized selves rather than for cultures requiring more related selves, reflecting the life story’s suitability for expressing individualized identities and its lesser suitability for expressing interdependent identities.
Reasoning may help solving problems and understanding personal experiences. Ruminative reasoning, however, is inconclusive, repetitive, and usually regards negative thoughts. We asked how reasoning as manifested in oral autobiographical narratives might differ when it is ruminative versus when it is adaptive by comparing two constructs from the fields of psychotherapy research and narrative research that are potentially beneficial: innovative moments (IMs) and autobiographical reasoning (AR). IMs captures statements in that elaborate on changes regarding an earlier personal previous problem of the narrator, and AR capture the connecting of past events with other parts of the narrator’s life or enduring aspects of the narrator. A total of N = 94 university students had been selected from 492 students to differ maximally on trait rumination and trait adaptive reflection, and were grouped as ruminators (N = 38), reflectors (N = 37), and a group with little ruminative and reflective tendencies (“unconcerned,” N = 19). Participants narrated three negative personal experiences (disappointing oneself, harming someone, and being rejected) and two self-related experiences of more mixed valence (turning point and lesson learnt). Reflectors used more IMs and more negative than positive autobiographical arguments (AAs), but not more overall AAs than ruminators. Group differences were not moderated by the valence of memories, and groups did not differ in the positive effect of narrating on mood. Trait depression/anxiety was predicted negatively by IMs and positively by AAs. Thus, IMs are typical for reflectors but not ruminators, whereas the construct of AR appears to capture reasoning processes irrespective of their ruminative versus adaptive uses.
Objective: To compare narrative coping with physical and psychological ambiguous loss (AL) and definite loss in terms of distancing (vs. narrative immersion), meaning-making, and subjective biographical consequences.
Methods: Thirty adults who had lost a parent to death, to going missing, or to Alzheimer disease (N = 90, 67 females; mean age 36.73 years, SD = 7.27; mean time since loss 9.0 years) narrated two loss-related and three control memories.
Results: Individuals with AL were not more immersed in the loss experience, but less successful in finding meaning and in evaluating the loss and its consequences positively compared to those with a definite loss. These group differences were not due to differences in depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and protracted grief.
Conclusions: Ambiguity of loss renders meaning-making and coherently narrating loss more difficult, leading to more negative affect, suggesting interventions that help narrating loss coherently in a self-accepting way.
[Nachruf] Peter Kutter
(2014)
