Em busca da narrativa perdida: desenvolvimento pessoal e social na modernidade tardia

Abstract

As modern societies became increasingly more complex and diversified, the major cultural narratives in which social relations were anchored gradually lost their power to assemble. This estrangement from traditional canons has deeply shaken the sense of identity of a very significant number of people, who related closely to the social positions they occupied in their communities of origin. Late Modernity, in which the self has become the centre of experience, is not an essence we can delimit, but rather a fluid, multiple, relational, and dialogical project. It is intimately related with cultural communities who share specific meanings and enable their members to confer a degree of coherence and meaning to their existence. One of the most promising and interesting models of psychological development takes the narrative as its core matrix to organise the meanings individuals build around their experiences. This paper intends to describe how the process of building and rebuilding narratives can shape the conceptual framework of reference for personal and social development in contemporary societies.