Criminals' personal narrative

Abstract

Within psychology and related social sciences there is an emerging framework for understanding a person’s actions and experiences in terms of what McAdams (McAdams, 1993) refers to as ‘The Stories We Live By’. This reflects the approach given particular emphasis by Bruner (Bruner, 1990) in his critique of the information processing model that so dominates cognitive psychology. It is argued that people give sense to their past, current and future lives by the roles they see themselves playing in key episodes that they remember experiencing. They formulate views of their identity and self-concept through an interpretation of the unfolding storyline that they see their lives as being. Importantly, the concept of a story here is not that of a fiction but of a constructed account derived from events and interactions with other