Narrative Self And The Postmodern Turn Of Psychology

The positivism orientation of Psychology has laid a solid foundation for its development and prosperity. However, this scientific psychology advocates objectivism and positivism, focus too much on methods and techniques, ignores people's initiative, without regard to historical and cultural variables, making psychology into all sorts of difficulties. While, the same time in philosophy, positivist view of science had been into unprecedented challenges and criticism. And post-modernism, an opposite trend of modernism is emerging. This postmodernism opposed to scientism, emphasize the diversity and uniqueness of human being. This happened to make up for the lack of scientific psychology. So the psychologists began to rebuild the psychological methods, which resulting in the post-modern psychology.Postmodern psychology advocates anti-foundationalism, anti-essential- ism, anti-individualism. It's thought that knowledge is constructed through languages. Self, personality and thinking are constructed by words, changing with time and location. Postmodern psychology promoted to use phenomenology, anthropology, linguistics and other viewpoints and methods to study psychological problems, digested the naturalistic research paradigm.Although the rise of postmodern psychology caused a fatal blow to the scientific psychology, the postmodern psychology has a short history and is not yet a mature school. It includes social constructivism, multiculturalism, deconstruction psychology, female psychology, narrative psychology and so on. Each of these theories developed separately and it does not promote the integration and unification of psychology.Narrative psychology , as an outstanding representative of postmodern psychology, have made a series of accomplishments in either theory construction or empirical studies. It deserves to be a new research paradigm in psychology. The concept of narrative or narrative research paradigm has become more and more popular in various publications. And some people have begun to call it a "narrative revolution", as if the narrative psychology reflects the future direction of psychology.Self is one of the most important topics in the history of psychology. All the schools try to explain it from their own perspectives, but they can not escape the pursuit of universal law, to find the"entity self". However, under the influence of postmodernism, "I" was not seen as the "core" or essence of the personality, that is, no psychological reality or spiritual entity. We should focus on the construction of self, not the entity self. While in narrative psychology, people are born as a story-teller, stories make people's experience to be consistent and continuous, and play a central role in interactions with others. We found ourselves from the narrative and show them to others. Narrative Self is the continuum of"I"in all the story of our lives .This paper attempts use self as the most ancient topic, compare traditional schools of psychology with the narrative psychology, explore a new vision about Self. And by the self as a clue, discuss the influence of the postmodernism and find a clarity way about the future development of psychology.