Doświadczenia życiowe a narracja tożsamościowa osoby

Life experience and narrative identity Narrative identity is a story about one’s biography. The story is composed with a use of interpretative schemas, which are provided by the culture. The story changes, when a person passes an important experience. It can change in a typical way, if the experience is typical, because culture offers particular set of possible interpretations of typical human experiences. A spectacular example of that phenomenon is the change of a story about one’s mother, when a woman becomes a mother herself (what is illustrated by conducted research). 50 woman married no longer then 4 years, were asked to tell a story about their mothers. Half of them have got one child (no older then 3 years), a second half have no children yet. Narratives were compared. Stories told by young mothers differ from childless’ women’s in many aspects, especially in paying attention to mother’s relations with others. Women, who have no children, speak of mother’s individual activities (her behavior, work, childhood etc). An experience of motherhood, as can be observed, changes the way the person perceives previous experience. It indicates that the narrative identity is not an agenda of the life events, it is rather a structure of the event’s interpretations – the interpretation constructed in terms of the general schema of meanings or, in other words, the general idea of one’s life.