Pathological Autobiographies

Abstract

It might seem obvious that an autobiography is a window into its author’s soul. But pathological “souls” can find expression either in the unusual content of their stories or in the use of a strange grammar. The study of the expression of self in stories is part of discursive psychology. This development is based on a Vygotskian thesis about the shaping of mind in the learning of linguistic and practical skills in symbiosis with another person, and on a Wittgensteinian insight that how we feel and how our thoughts are organized are expressed in characteristic language games. The selfhood of autobiographical telling is expressed predominantly in the uses of first and second person (indexical) pronouns and in the choice of narrative conventions within which to tell the story. Pronouns are used to index what is said with the various locations of the speaker as a person among persons in several patterns of relations. The uses of “I” with the tenses of verbs, together with local narrative conventions, expresses the shapes of the many stories we can tell about ourselves. It is quite usual for each person to have many autobiographies. But when non-standard uses of pronouns appear, we must be alert to a kind of linguistic pathology which, given the strength of the expressive account of language use, may express a pathological structuring of the mind of the speaker.

Introduction

In the small English city of Gloucester there once lived a couple, Fred and Rosemary West. For more than fifteen years they pursued a way of life so extraordinary that our capacity even to imagine what they did, let alone explain it is nearly exhausted. For the psychologist the question must be: what was it like to be Fred West? Or to be Rosemary? After his arrest Fred produced a vast autobiography, some of which has been published in newspapers. The English pronominal system and associated positioning devices allowed him to take all the responsibility for the appalling treatment of the victims upon himself. The indexicality of place that pronoun usage offers a speaker was used time and again to locate Rosemary far from the times and places of the events in question. The indexicality of responsibility was used time and again to locate the whole agentic power in himself. At the same time as we pay attention to the grammatical devices by which Fred West’s relation to the events was constructed, we must also take account of the fact that this was an extended narration, many acts of story telling. Stories have their own logic, the narrative conventions of the culture. During the trial many other people told the stories of their encounters with the Wests. And in the discursive acts of the trial itself, various other versions were produced. From the standpoint of discursive psychology, the key not only to what the Wests have said, but also to what they did lies in the patterns of storytelling within which these horrific episodes were embedded. This paper is an attempt to sketch an approach to the pathology of narrative, as an expression of the pathology of a life.

Broadly speaking these preliminary remarks suggest that there could be at least two ways in which autobiographical narratives might display a pathology which one would be inclined to say expressed a pathological form of life. Subscribing to common narrative conventions and, so far as one can judge, employing the grammatical resources of English in the accepted manner, in a certain sense Fred West’s autobiography was not pathological. The story he told was horrific, but it was a story the form of which we can all recognize. Perhaps the disturbing effect of these revelations was due in part to the commonplace and even stereotypical use of pronoun grammar and narrative conventions in their telling. But there is another kind of pathology of autobiography, a brief examination of which this paper is devoted. It is the kind of pathology that one finds in the life stories of people like Miss Beauchamp and Eve White/Black, two well known cases of...