Interpersonal accounts : a social psychological perspective

The human is perhaps best dubbed "Homo Narrans", the story-teller. In the search for meanings, humans constantly tell stories and make accounts to explain events and frame relationships. This book presents a systematic analysis from a psychological standpoint of this universal and fundamental human capacity. Nowhere is account-making more evident than at time of acute personal stress. In divorce and separation, death of a spouse, redundancy or retirement, for example, people often deal best with loss when they have worked through its meaning for themselves and have confided that meaning to empathic others. It is in the process of account making that people look to create meaning out of loss. So fundamental an activity as account-making must, the authors believe, have evolutionary origins. Drawing on the work of Jaynes, they consider the process in relation to the origin of human consciousness and the beginnings of story telling as a human activity.