Life Narrative and Therapeutic Autobiography

Overview

Life narrative and therapeutic autobiography encompass all practices that use the narrative reconstruction of personal history as a tool for psychological care, meaning-making, and identity restoration. The fundamental postulate is that human beings are narrative beings: we understand our existence by telling it, we construct our identity through the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

When narrative continuity is broken — by trauma, uprooting, serious illness, aging, or identity crisis — the person loses the thread of their story and, with it, the sense of who they are. Therapeutic life narrative aims to reweave this thread, not by faithfully restituting past facts but by actively reconstructing a narration that gives meaning, coherence, and continuity to existence.

Origins and Theoretical Foundations

Daniel Bertaux, a French sociologist, developed the life narrative method in the 1970s as a sociological research tool. His methodology, which accompanies the person in a chronological account of their life while focusing on turning points, ruptures, and choices, was widely adopted in the therapeutic field.

Paul Ricœur, a French philosopher, elaborated the concept of narrative identity in Oneself as Another (1990). For Ricœur, our identity is neither a fixed substance nor a pure illusion but a narrative construction: we are the stories we tell ourselves. Robert Butler, American psychiatrist and gerontologist, introduced the concept of "life review" in 1963 — a natural process in elderly persons who revisit their past to find meaning. Michael White and David Epston, founders of narrative therapy in the 1980s, developed powerful re-narration techniques, externalizing problems and searching for "exceptions" to construct richer alternative stories.

Narrative Identity and Meaning-Making

• Emplotment: transforming a succession of events into a story with a beginning, development, and meaning — turning experiential chaos into ordered narration
• Discordant concordance: integrating unexpected events, ruptures, contradictions, and paradoxes into a coherent narrative
• Refiguration: narrative doesn't merely represent the past but transforms it. Telling one's story differently changes the meaning of past events and opens new possibilities
• Narrative promise: telling one's story also means projecting forward — the life narrative sketches a possible future, a direction that extends the story

Life Narrative Techniques

• Lifeline: the participant draws a chronological line representing their life, placing significant events. Spatial visualization reveals periods, cycles, and recurring themes invisible to linear narrative
• Commented photo album: bringing significant photographs and commenting on them orally or in writing. Each photo is a "memory node" triggering stories and associations — particularly powerful with elderly persons
• Letter to self: writing to oneself at another age — the child one was, the struggling adolescent, one's future self. This trans-temporal dialogue revisits life periods with mature perspective
• Ethical will: a document transmitting not material goods but values, life lessons, hopes, and regrets — practiced in palliative care and Jewish communities
• Narrative objects: choosing a significant object and telling its story, memories, and meanings
• Turning points narrative: identifying and deeply exploring life's bifurcation moments — crucial decisions, determining encounters, events that "changed everything"

Specific Applications

• Elderly and reminiscence therapy: the most documented application. Meta-analyses show significant effects on depression, self-esteem, and life satisfaction, including in mild to moderate dementia. In nursing homes, reminiscence groups also stimulate socialization
• Migrants and uprooted persons: life narrative allows migrants to reconstitute existential continuity across the rupture of exile, weaving a narrative thread between homeland and host country
• End of life and palliative care: Harvey Chochinov's "dignity therapy" uses a structured life narrative protocol producing a document bequeathed to loved ones, significantly reducing existential distress
• Post-trauma reconstruction: trauma breaks narrative continuity. Therapeutic life narrative reconstructs a narration that integrates the traumatic event without being reduced to it
• Adolescents and young adults: life narrative helps young people situate themselves in family and social history, using commented genograms and family narratives

Intercultural Dimension

Life narrative possesses a fundamental intercultural dimension. In all cultures, oral transmission of life stories constitutes a pillar of social cohesion and identity construction. West African griots, Native American storytellers, Jewish community elders transmitting Shoah memory, Aboriginal memory keepers — all testify to the universal role of life narrative in intergenerational transmission.

In intercultural therapeutic contexts, life narrative offers a space where the patient's different cultural belongings can coexist and dialogue. For children of immigrants, telling parents' stories allows understanding of transmitted heritage. For refugees, life narrative is often the only possession carried into exile: their story. Anne Ancelin Schützenberger's work on transgenerational transmission showed how unprocessed traumas are unconsciously passed between generations. Life narrative makes this chain visible and breaks transgenerational repetition through words and consciousness.

Contraindications

• Active psychosis with thought disorganization (narrative work requires minimal capacity for temporal and causal organization)
• Severe dementia with significant autobiographical memory loss (life narrative remains possible in mild to moderate dementia with adaptations — photographic support, simple questions, short sessions)
• Recent unstabilized trauma (life narrative involves past revisitation that can be destabilizing if the present is insufficiently secure)
• Active family secret with real danger risk (some life narratives may uncover secrets whose revelation could have consequences the patient isn't ready to face)
• Rigid idealization of the past (some individuals use life narrative as a defense, systematically idealizing the past to avoid present confrontation)