Discussing nonconscious processes involved in autobiography

Abstract

Early in life, most persons successfully acquire socially shared psychollages (constructions) that are accessed by the term well-formed story. The remembering processes involved in creating non-verbalized, self-guiding anticipatory narratives mirror the remembering processes involved in verbally recounting the tale of an episode in the life of the story teller. The level of success in matching the outcome slot in the self-guiding anticipatory narrative with the inputs that follow the actor's course of action determine the level of motivation for the person's attempt at revision of his/her self-guiding narrative. Under conditions of high match (low motivation for revision of narrative), much of the memory processing takes place "off awareness." To develop a strong theory of the place of narrative in person functioning, a theorist must develop useful formulations to describe "nonconscious" narrative-building processes.Requests for further information should be directed to James Mancuso,