Narrative self: The stories that enslave or liberate us

The central term in this paper is personal narrative, which is interpreted as the backbone of human identity by the narrative theory. According to this standpoint, personal narrative plays central role in the constitution of human self. Here narrative is not considered from literary perspective, but as how a person composes, structures and conceives his own life through her personal story. In the narrative approach, human being is defined as a linguistic being, who constructs his own self in language by selecting, generating, determining certain meaning instead others. Besides, human being is a relational being, which means that he develops and changes through interactive exchanges, i.e. through communication with other people. He is also determined by the dominant narratives of his culture. The narrative theory is based on the social constructivism's postulate that human reality does not represent factual reality, but that it is constituted and permeated by meanings. The personal narrative connects the fragments of life a in coherent, unfinished and changeable whole, giving them meaning and sense. The core idea which is presented in this paper is that no one is captive of his cultural context or personal narrative, especially when it is saturated with problems, but that he has the capacity to be the author and manage the 'scenography of his own life'. The essence of the liberating effect of the narration lies in the verbalization by which the problem is drawn out of oneself, externalized into the intersubjective space and 'dissolved' in a different, reconstructed narration.