Habermas, T. (2010).

Autobiographical reasoning: Arguing and narrating from a biographi-

cal perspective. In T. Habermas (Ed.) The development of autobiographical reasoning in
adolescence and beyond. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 131, 1–17.

1
Autobiographical Reasoning:
Arguing and Narrating from
a Biographical Perspective
Tilmann Habermas

Abstract
Autobiographical reasoning is the activity of creating relations between differ-
ent parts of one’s past, present, and future life and one’s personality and devel-
opment. It embeds personal memories in a culturally, temporally, causally, and
thematically coherent life story. Prototypical autobiographical arguments are
presented. Culture and socializing interactions shape the development of auto-
biographical reasoning especially in late childhood and adolescence. Situated
at the intersection of cognitive and narrative development and autobiographi-
cal memory, autobiographical reasoning contributes to the development of per-
sonality and identity, is instrumental in efforts to cope with life events, and
helps to create a shared history. © Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Thanks to Verena Diel for critical comments on this chapter and to Anna Kenney and
Andrea Silberstein for their editorial help with the volume, and to Susan Bluck with
whom I first developed the concept of autobiographical reasoning.

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR CHILD AND ADOLESCENT DEVELOPMENT, no. 131, Spring 2011 © Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). • DOI: 10.1002/cd.285 1
2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REASONING

H ermann Ebbinghaus lay the foundations for the psychology of

memory in 1880 by substituting everyday remembering with an
experimental paradigm that focused on the controlled learning of
elements with identical value, the correct remembering of which could
therefore be counted and related to the passing of time. These elements
were to have no links, neither to words nor to things; they were designed
to have no prior meaning (Ebbinghaus, 1983). This paradigm defined
memory psychology for an entire century, with a few important excep-
tions such as work by Bartlett (1932). Maybe the most outspoken anti-
pode to Ebbinghaus was his colleague at the University of Berlin,
Wilhelm Dilthey (1895), who proclaimed life stories as the model for the
Geisteswissenschaften, the humanities, which approach their subject
through historical understanding. Life stories center on emergent mean-
ing, not numbers. Linking the events within a life to each other and the
individual’s overall development, and embedding this life in a social and
historical context, endows the life with meaning. Wilhelm Dilthey was
not interested in memory, but in obtaining the most exhaustive informa-
tion possible about phenomena that need to be understood in the light of
their history.
Psychology began to leave Ebbinghaus’s “memorizing trap” (Dan-
ziger, 2008) only a century later, moving one step in the direction of
Dilthey by developing an interest in everyday remembering instead of
memorizing laboratory material (Neisser, 1982). This new object of psy-
chological research was termed autobiographical memory (Rubin, 1986).
Psychologists, interested in the representation of temporally structured
knowledge, took a further step in the direction of Dilthey’s interest in the
life story by introducing narrative as the central form for organizing and
communicating events (Nelson & Gruendel, 1981).
Everyday remembering of single events involves varying degrees of
linking, contextualizing, and interpreting. One kind of linking consists of
creating the temporal, spatial, and social context of the remembered epi-
sode. In narratives, this is the purpose of the initial orientation section.
Another kind of linking is of a more linear nature and consists of linking
actions and events by putting them in a temporal-causal order that makes
sense to the rememberer and the listener alike. In narratives, this is the
purpose of explanations and narrative clauses, the sequence of which imi-
tates the sequence of events. Except for some involuntary memories (cf.
Berntsen, 2009), everyday remembering is an active, reconstructive activ-
ity that involves at least some degree of argumentative linking, or narra-
tive reasoning (Rubin & Greenberg, 2003).
In this volume, we take the next step in the direction of Dilthey’s
life-historical approach to memory and individuality, by focusing on
narratives of memories, not of any everyday events, but on past, present,
and future events that are of biographical relevance. Biographical rele-
vance marks aspects of one’s past that have meaning for one’s life, and
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 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REASONING 3

therefore would justifiably enter one’s written autobiography. These

meaningful events are contextualized by life, linked not only by chrono-
logical order, but also by arguments that state thematic or causal-motiva-
tional implications, similarities, or consequences. Habermas and Bluck
(2000) coined the term autobiographical reasoning for this activity of
explicating the biographical relevance of memories. Autobiographical rea-
soning creates links between remembered events and other distant parts
of one’s life and to the self and its development. It refers to the remember-
ing subject’s life as the relevant frame of reference, thereby implying the
life story. Autobiographical reasoning requires extra mental effort that
goes beyond the effort of mere remembering. We termed this activity as
reasoning to underscore three aspects: the constructive and interpretative
nature of the activity, the both cognitive and communicative nature of it,
and its normative aspect implied by its appeal to reason and logic. The
term reasoning also alludes to the cognitive-developmental tradition
(Piaget, 1924), which we wed to the narrative tradition. Related con-
structs are those of the life review (Butler, 1963), identity-related reminisc-
ing (Webster, 1993), and reflecting on life (Pasupathi, Weeks, & Rice,
2006; Staudinger, 2001) because they tend to require reference to the
whole life.
Autobiographical reasoning is a late acquisition in socio-cognitive
development, as it begins to develop only in preadolescence and continues
to mature throughout adolescence. This development draws remembering
closer to the self, maximizing identity implications of remembered epi-
sodes by linking them to individual development. Only the ability for
autobiographical reasoning allows individuals to understand what it
means when they are asked for self-defining memories.
This volume demonstrates how a focus on this late maturing
competence opens new perspectives in the psychology of adolescence.
This introductory chapter contextualizes the main arguments of the
following chapters. First, I will outline the conceptual life story frame-
work of which autobiographical reasoning is a part and then present
some prototypical arguments used in autobiographical reasoning. Then
I will discuss what is known to date about the development of the ability
for autobiographical reasoning in adolescence and age differences in
its spontaneous use across adulthood. As autobiographical reasoning
is conceived as a basically socio-cognitive process, I will then discuss
which cultural models influence autobiographical reasoning, and which
socializing narrative and discursive practices may shape autobiographical
reasoning especially in adolescence. Finally, I will review mostly indirect
evidence on how autobiographical reasoning is adaptive in different
contexts. This introduction and the following chapters take a strong
theoretical stance, mapping new areas for research in adolescence
and beyond. The introduction closes with a brief presentation of each
chapter.
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4 THE DEVELOPMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REASONING

Autobiographical Reasoning Builds and Uses

the Life Story
We conceived of autobiographical reasoning as one of two possible mani-
festations of the autobiographical life story, the other being entire life nar-
ratives. An essential aspect of the life story is its global coherence. Its parts
are related to each other and to the whole; events are related to other
events and to the development of the individual. We highlighted four
kinds of global coherence of special relevance to the life story. First, life
stories are constructed following more or less a cultural concept of biogra-
phy, which we defined as a skeletal structure of temporally ordered bio-
graphically salient life events with age norms attached to them (Habermas
& Bluck, 2000). This sequence of life events was termed life script by
Berntsen and Rubin (2004). It represents a normative cultural life course
(Neugarten, Moore, & Lowe, 1965). Other aspects of the cultural concept
of biography concern not how life is to be lived, but how life is to be nar-
rated, such as how to begin and end a life narrative (Habermas, Ehlert-
Lerche, & de Silveira, 2009). Second, global temporal coherence allows the
listener to locate events in the narrator’s life. The most basic temporal
order of events in narratives is chronological. Artful narrators may deviate
from this pattern, but to maintain global temporal coherence they need to
mark deviations from chronological time (Habermas et al., 2009). Third,
global causal-motivational coherence provides a sense of direction and pur-
pose to a life. Life narratives vary in the degree to which events are pur-
ported to be caused externally or motivated by one’s desires, aims, and
values (Schafer, 1983). Causal-motivational coherence bridges change,
connecting what had been earlier and what became of it, most notably the
narrator’s person and personality. Fourth, global thematic coherence is
established by extracting continuities across change. Global coherence is
what differentiates the life story from mere lists of unrelated memories
from one’s life.
Whereas entire life narratives are usually only produced in research
interviews, in everyday life the life story is usually manifested in the more
partial form of autobiographical reasoning. We suggested that repeated
autobiographical reasoning leads to the construction of a rudimentary
knowledge structure in memory that relates to life as a whole, termed life
story schema, which in turn is activated and used in autobiographical
reasoning. Thus, autobiographical reasoning may involve arguments con-
structed on the spot, which are then saved as an enduring knowledge
structure. It may also use arguments already stored in memory, such as the
product of earlier autobiographical reasoning. In the process of autobio-
graphical reasoning, past events may be remembered and are then inter-
preted by putting them in a biographical context (Bluck & Habermas,
2000). Despite obvious motivational differences, autobiographical reason-
ing is structurally identical with biographical reasoning about another
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 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REASONING 5

individual’s life because it takes an external, third-person perspective of a

life. This structural homology shows both in studies of the memory of and
reasoning about literary representations of life in novels and short stories
(Copeland, Radvansky & Goodwin, 2009; Feldman, Bruner, Kalmar, &
Renderer, 1993; Genereux & McKeough, 2007; Mar & Oatley, 2008), as
well as in clinical practice. Psychoanalysts construct life stories of their
patients to identify recurrent themes and conflicts, and to explain these
developmentally as responses to specific experiences and to developing
motives and conflicts. In principle, this kind of reconstruction is structur-
ally homologous to how patients themselves may narrate and explain their
lives (Linde, 1993; Schafer, 1983).

Prototypical Autobiographical Arguments

Autobiographical reasoning often involves some of the following
prototypical arguments (Habermas & Paha, 2001; cf. Pasupathi, &
Weeks, Chapter Three; Fivush, Bohanek, & Zaman, Chapter Four, for
additional autobiographical arguments). I shall first describe arguments
that bridge change, then arguments that establish continuity. They are
arguments insofar as they provide reasons for claims or causes for states
of affairs.
Biographical Change. The following list of autobiographical argu-
ments ranges from very basic to more complex references to biography. A
normative idea of the life course may be invoked by referring to the devel-
opmental status of an individual to explain his or her reaction, ability, or
sensibility (McCabe, Capron, & Peterson, 1991), such as in “My parents’
divorce didn’t affect me much. I wasn’t really aware of what was happen-
ing. I was still too little.” In a more individual vein, specific experiences
may be said to have had a formative influence on the individual, for exam-
ple, by stating the influence of a role model. More individual influences of
specific events on the development of personality can be designated as
events causing personality change, such as in “After age ten, I became a shy
person because the separation of my parents made me distrust others.” An
experience may also have a more specific influence in creating a sensibility
or motivation to react in a specific way in specific kinds of situations
(Feldman et al., 1993). This very typical biographical argument is used to
explain strange behaviors by reference to the biographical background of
the individual, such as in “When a car suddenly raced towards us, he pan-
icked. He had been run over by a car when he was small.” Events may also
be causally related to long-term biographical consequences, such as changes
in life circumstances, relationships, or later events. Mackavey, Malley, and
Stewart (1991) identified events in the written autobiographies of forty-
nine psychologists that were explicitly named as biographically conse-
quential. They most frequently came from early adulthood. A specific
linguistic form to point out biographical consequences is a past–present
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6 THE DEVELOPMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REASONING

comparison that states that something is different ever since a specified

event happened.
An especially important set of biographical arguments regards change
in the individual’s knowledge and understanding, evaluations, and inten-
tions. A simple way for an event to change an individual’s outlook is to
provide new information. An increase in knowledge is often expressed
negatively by stating that at a specific point in life one had not yet known
something, or by verbs like finding out. Experiences in which an aspect of
personality is revealed belong to this category if the assumption is that the
aspect has always been there, for instance the metaphor of coming out
implies a process of revelation of sexual orientation (cf. Pasupathi &
Weeks, Chapter Three). A more active change in outlook is brought about
when the individual learns a lesson. An experience is related to a lasting
understanding of a mechanism and how to better deal with a specific situ-
ation, like when a twelve-year-old boy states, “That’s why I told myself,
next time I fall in love, school work should not suffer from it.” The indi-
vidual actively processes an experience, but the inferences drawn remain
limited to circumscribed situations. The most profound process of under-
standing is involved in general insights. The individual generalizes a single
experience to a very general rule of how the world works, as in this insight
of a fifteen-year-old girl: “I was really emotionally hooked up with him for
a long time. Probably that’s what always happens when it’s the first kiss”
(Habermas & Paha, 2001; cf. McLean & Thorne, 2003). These biographi-
cal arguments that relate an experience to a change in the subjective out-
look usually imply an increase in understanding and insight.
Biographical Continuity. Thematic coherence is most often con-
structed hierarchically, by creating a higher-level category that integrates
more specific categories or instances. By assimilating diverse, temporally
distributed local elements of a life to an overarching concept, continuity is
created. A major device in autobiographical narratives is exemplification. A
general statement covering an extended period, for example, about one’s
personality, may be substantiated by providing an episode in which this
trait is manifested. A formally similar argument is used to explain specific
actions by the actor’s personality. Whereas exemplifications start from a
general, abstract claim that is then exemplified, explanations of actions by
personality are adduced within the context of a specific episode—they
proceed from the particular (explanandum) to the general (explanans).
Pasupathi, Mansour, and Brubaker (2007) pointed to an interesting varia-
tion of the argument, namely negating that an action can be explained by
a trait, by stating that an action is atypical for the self, thereby safeguard-
ing self-continuity against events that disrupt continuity. Another way to
highlight stability is to state that something is still the same today. Finally,
parallels may be constructed between a specific episode and other episodes.
Thus, narrators frequently state that a given kind of experience happened
to them more than once, or that it was a typical experience. In this case, it
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 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REASONING 7

is not an abstract trait, but a class of episodes or pattern of experiences

that is stable.

Development of Autobiographical Reasoning

We have reviewed probable developmental prerequisites of autobiographi-
cal reasoning (Habermas & Bluck, 2000). Briefly stated, autobiographical
reasoning joins the categorical concept of person with the temporal struc-
ture of event representations (cf. Nelson & Gruendel, 1981), socio-cogni-
tive with narrative development. Older grade school children and
preadolescents know how to narrate single episodes (Peterson & McCabe,
1994), and they have developed a complex person concept organized in
terms of abstract dispositions that explain more specific habits and atti-
tudes (Selman, 1980). Only during adolescence, however, do they learn to
conceive of individuals in biographical terms, contextualizing personality
in individual development that bridges personal discontinuities in increas-
ingly sophisticated ways (Chandler, Lalonde, Sokol, & Hallett, 2003;
Selman, 1980). Therefore, it is only in adolescence that coherent life nar-
ratives can be constructed. Wedding the neo-Piagetian cognitive-develop-
mental theory of Case (1985) with narrative developmental theory, Anne
McKeough and Genereux (2003) showed a significant increase of inter-
pretative biographical abilities between ages ten and eighteen (cf. McK-
eough & Malcolm, Chapter Five). In an exploratory (Habermas & Paha,
2001) and two larger studies of entire life narratives—oral narratives span-
ning ages eight to twenty (Habermas & de Silveira, 2008) and written nar-
ratives spanning ages nine to fifteen (Bohn & Berntsen, 2008)—globally
coherent life stories were absent in older children and gradually emerged
across early and mid-adolescence. The studies used a variety of measures
of global coherence, from relative frequencies of autobiographical reason-
ing and global coherence ratings to codes of the autobiographical well-
formedness of beginnings and endings and judgments of the overall
narrative structure.
The spontaneous use of autobiographical reasoning appears to
increase beyond adolescence. In a life-span study of narratives of wisdom-
related events, the spontaneous creation of causal links to other life events
increased across adulthood, and drawing a lesson from this experience
increased between adolescence and middle adulthood (Bluck & Glück,
2004). Another element of autobiographical reasoning, creating causal
links between biographical events and the self and personal development,
increased in crisis narratives across adulthood (Pasupathi & Mansour,
2006). In a study by McLean (2008), however, younger and older adults
did not differ in the frequency of self-event connections in narratives of
self-defining memories.
Apart from identifying autobiographical reasoning as elements of life
narratives, Habermas, Fröhlich, and Diel (2009) devised a separate
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8 THE DEVELOPMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REASONING

semi-structured Autobiographical Reasoning Interview to test for the

spontaneous tendency of and the ability to use autobiographical reason-
ing. The interview elicits a narrative of an important life event, and then
asks for specific factual and counterfactual causal-motivational links, as
well as for thematic links between the event and other events or the narra-
tor’s self. This research team found a dramatic increase in autobiographical
links provided between late childhood and mid-adolescence. The increase
showed both in spontaneous autobiographical reasoning as well as in the
generally higher maximal competence as demonstrated in responses to
probing.

Cultural Models
Whereas narrative is a universal format to share experiences and event
knowledge, the life story may not be universal. The prototypical Western
developmental life story is derived from literary autobiographies and dates
back only to the eighteenth century to works such as Rousseau’s Confes-
sions. In a cross-cultural comparison, some cultures seem to demand more
telling of life stories and autobiographical reasoning than others (Tonkin,
1992). Western cultures appear to stress remembering of personal experi-
ences and elaborations of the personal point of view at least for single
experiences (e.g., Wang, 2004). Given this historical and cultural varia-
tion, it is plausible to assume that what is considered a good life story also
varies with culture. In Europe, knowledge about the normative skeletal
version of a life in terms of biographically salient life events and their age
norms is acquired during early to mid-adolescence, not as a consequence
of experiencing these events, but as a unitary concept stretching across life
(Bohn & Berntsen, 2008; Habermas, 2007). Knowledge of the life script
also correlates with the global coherence of life narratives (cf. Bohn, Chap-
ter Two) and with both causal and thematic autobiographical reasoning
(Habermas et al., 2009).
There may be different pathways for acquiring this cultural knowl-
edge and ability. One could be the use of cultural media such as watching
talk shows on TV or reading biographies and novels. There are strong
arguments that reading fiction helps to develop an understanding of
human motives and empathy (Mar & Oatley, 2008). Mar, Peskin, and
Fong (Chapter Six) point out that reading about the lives of others may
elicit a self-centered reading that draws parallels between protagonists’
lives or narrators’ interpretations and the understanding of one’s own life.
Novels may serve especially as a model for constructing an extended life
story in its temporal-causal ordering. Mar and colleagues also make a
strong point by noting that poetry may foster readers’ ability and propen-
sity to find metaphors, helping to create thematic coherence in a life.
This resonates with some of the excerpts of family stories reported by
McKeough and Malcolm in Chapter Five in which the older adolescents
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 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REASONING 9

use metaphors to integrate characteristic aspects. In our Autobiographical

Reasoning Interview, the central question for thematic links asks for a red
thread or overarching theme of one’s life, i.e., for metaphors. Accordingly,
the frequency of a youth’s participation in biographical practices such as
writing diaries or letters, or reading biographies correlates with the tempo-
ral global coherence and the well-formedness of endings of life narratives
(Habermas & de Silveira, 2008; Habermas et al., 2009) as well as with
temporal autobiographical reasoning (Habermas et al., 2009).

Socializing Narrative Practices

A more direct way to acquire the cultural concept of biography may be by
participating in socializing interactions with more cognitively mature and
competent members of a culture. Basic narrative ability is acquired in
memory talk with adults who help young children structure their memo-
ries by heavy scaffolding (Fivush, Haden, & Reese, 2006). Although ado-
lescents are much more autonomous than preschool children and do
participate in the wider culture on their own, talk about the past is still
very much shared with parents and the family. Fivush and colleagues
(Chapter Four) show that spontaneous talk about the shared past is quite
frequent in families. Reminiscing in families need not involve autobio-
graphical reasoning and will often consist of mere mutual confirmation of
a shared past. However, what Fivush and colleagues call intergenerational
narratives—parents’ narratives about their own lives—often evoke autobi-
ographical reasoning on the part of adolescents who draw parallels
between their own and their parent’s life, or point to how parents’ advice is
rooted in their life experience. The kind of naturalistic research on every-
day talk presented by Fivush and colleagues is a necessary, but starkly
underrepresented approach to psychological phenomena.
Although parent–child dialogues studied in the laboratory cannot
provide information about the spontaneous use of autobiographical rea-
soning, they do tell us something about how parents and adolescents
may talk to each other. Pasupathi and Weeks (Chapter Three) provide
illuminative excerpts from mother–daughter dialogues in which the
mother crafts a continuous personality of the daughter that stretches from
the past into the future. They also show how a mother challenges her ado-
lescent daughter’s self-understanding, arguing for the stability of her per-
sonality, based also on her advantage of knowing the daughter’s distant
past better than the daughter herself does. Pasupathi and Weeks hypothe-
size that parents may enable their children to discover continuities,
whereas peers as listeners might be better suited to emphasize change and
development.
How the stories that are repeatedly told in families, termed family
stories, are digested by adolescents according to their cognitive develop-
ment is demonstrated in the contribution by Anne McKeough and Jennifer
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10 THE DEVELOPMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REASONING

Malcolm (Chapter Five). With a clinical interview following up on the re-

narration of a family story, the authors show how older children stick to a
literal interpretation of the story, whereas preadolescents draw a moral
from the story, and mid-adolescents excerpt some overarching insight that
applies not only to the adolescent, but to lives in general. Thus as adoles-
cents mature cognitively, they increasingly interpret biographical stories
they hear from their parents and integrate them into their view of their
own (and their parents’) lives by means of the developing ability for auto-
biographical reasoning. McKeough and Malcolm show how general cogni-
tive abilities are applied to fictional narratives and, more specifically, to
family narratives pertaining to their own lives. They thus succeed in relat-
ing general social-cognitive development to narrative development and
autobiographical reasoning.
Although longitudinal studies of the effects of shared parental autobi-
ographical reasoning on adolescents’ ability for autobiographical reason-
ing are lacking, there is at least some evidence that mothers adapt to the
growth of the child’s and adolescent’s ability for autobiographical reason-
ing by supporting abilities that their child is only about to learn. Preado-
lescents first learn to temporally structure a life story with the help of the
life script, and only later learn to construct causal-motivational and the-
matic coherence in life narratives by relating life events to each other and
the self (Habermas & de Silveira, 2008). Accordingly, in an exploratory
study of life stories co-narrated by sixteen mothers and their children, in
late childhood and preadolescence mothers supported temporal autobio-
graphical reasoning, whereas in early and mid-adolescence they supported
causal-motivational reasoning that focused on personality and its develop-
ment (Habermas, Negele, & Brenneisen-Mayer, in press).

Functions and Adaptivity of Autobiographical

Reasoning
The ability to create coherence and continuity in one’s life story is norma-
tively expected from adult members of Western cultures and contributes
to a mature and healthy psycho-social identity (Erikson, 1968). This
seems to suggest that autobiographical reasoning is beneficial by helping
to integrate diverse aspects of one’s past and personality into a coherent
and continuous self. Fivush, Bohanek, and Zaman (Chapter Four) provide
evidence that adolescents whose mothers are involved in co-narrating dis-
tant memories with them have less psychological symptoms. Pennebaker
and colleagues found that repeatedly writing about a traumatic event with
increasing causal connections and words indicating insight is related to
better physical health (Pennebaker, Mayne, & Francis, 1997; cf. Frattaroli,
2006). In a study more directly related to the life story, a composite mea-
sure of narrative coherence for significant life memories correlated with
measures of well-being (Baerger & McAdams, 1999). One of the four
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 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REASONING 11

criteria of coherence had been whether the event was explicitly related to
other parts of the narrator’s life. In a four-year longitudinal study, an
increase in emotional health correlated with causal reasoning in narratives
of personality change at the end of these four years (Lodi-Smith et al.,
2009).
The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy,
1985) also seems to suggest that autobiographical reasoning reflects psy-
chological health. It is a semi-structured biographical interview that mea-
sures attachment security as communicative coherence in the sense that
abstract claims and concrete examples for one’s past relationships are ade-
quately and convincingly expressed. Although the AAI aims at eliciting
autobiographical reasoning, it is not the frequency of autobiographical
reasoning but its quality that is relevant for the categorization of attach-
ment security. Accordingly, in a reanalysis of AAI transcripts of twenty-
seven young women (cf. Gloger-Tippelt, Gomille, König, & Vetter, 2002),
we found no differences between securely and insecurely attached women
in terms of relative frequencies of the use of autobiographical arguments
and exemplifications (Höpfner, 2007). Similarly, life narratives of clinically
depressed in-patients did not contain less autobiographical arguments
than those of matched controls (Habermas, Ott, Schubert, Schneider, &
Pate, 2008). Some authors even argue that, at least with regard to trau-
matic experiences, it is detrimental to psychological health to integrate
these experiences into one’s life story (Berntsen & Rubin, 2007). McLean
and Mansfield (Chapter Seven) review evidence from their own and oth-
ers’ research that the adaptivity of autobiographical reasoning may vary
with context, content, and age. A promising suggestion of theirs is that
one precondition for autobiographical reasoning to be helpful is that one
is sufficiently mature enough to adequately reason autobiographically and
not just to ruminate about past events.
From a clinical perspective, detrimental effects could be expected
from too intellectual uses of autobiographical reasoning that only serve to
suppress emotions. In addition, repetitive ruminating about the same neg-
ative aspects of the past is a symptom of depression. Treynor, Gonzalez,
and Nolen-Hoeksema (2003) found that brooding over negative conse-
quences of depression predicted an increase in depression, whereas reflect-
ing upon possible reasons for one’s depression predicted a decrease. Other
aspects of autobiographical reasoning which may impact how beneficial it
is are whether it is used for solving a specific problem or not (see McLean
and Mansfield, Chapter Seven) and whether it is used in solitary thinking
or in communication with others.
In a way, autobiographical reasoning may be beneficial to the degree
that it is normative. I do not intend this to mean that the life story needs
to follow conventional conceptions, although in a Danish sample a con-
ventional life correlated negatively with depressiveness, but not so in a
U.S. sample (Rubin, Berntsen, & Hutson, 2009) nor in a German sample
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12 THE DEVELOPMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REASONING

(Habermas, Negele, Arslan, & Tavenaux, 2008). Rather, autobiographical

reasoning might be beneficial if it fulfills a criterion that transcends the
formal definition adopted here, that is, if it follows communicative norms
to adhere to common sense so that listeners may find it plausible and
reasonable.
The concept of autobiographical reasoning is intended to bridge the
radical gap between Ebbinghaus and Dilthey. Our conception of memory
starts with everyday remembering that is both linguistic and meaningful,
embedded in dialogue and relationships, and influenced by wishes and
their biographical roots. We thus suggest to keep our theoretical concep-
tion of memory as complex as necessary to do justice to the phenomena of
interest. Methodologically, case studies that allow apprehending the com-
plexities of specific contexts and individual lives are a rich and necessary
part of psychological research (e.g., Larsen & Hansen, 2005). Memory
is narrative if it is successful. However, and this is what we retain from
the Ebbinghaus tradition, we have an interest in empirically based gener-
alizations of psychological insight, which requires systematic empirical
comparison. For these purposes, it is important that the concept of auto-
biographical reasoning allows some degree of quantification.

Overview of the Volume

This volume has been composed to offer an overview of relevant develop-
mental research on autobiographical reasoning to date and to integrate
contributions from memory, cognitive developmental, narrative, discourse,
identity, literary, and coping perspectives, and to present conceptual
advances. In the course of this volume, the perspective on autobiographi-
cal reasoning gradually expands, starting with a focus on the individual,
opening up to interactions and the family, to the wider culture via litera-
ture, and ending with a shift of focus on the consequences of autobio-
graphical reasoning.
In Chapter Two, Annette Bohn argues for the central role of the cul-
tural life script in creating coherence in life stories. Global coherence of
written life narratives correlates with the acquisition of the life script. The
latter, however, does not correlate with coherence in single-event narra-
tives, underlining the difference between stories and life stories. Bohn
exemplifies the interplay between the personal and the prescriptive cul-
tural form by contrasting the presumed life narrative of a nine-year-old
boy with his life narrative three years later, which corresponds much bet-
ter to what we expect a life story to read like.
In Chapter Three, Monisha Pasupathi and Trisha Weeks define the
core of autobiographical reasoning as the act of establishing links between
events in time and the self-concept. They present a system of this kind of
autobiographical argument that they term self-event relations. These can be
identified in narratives of single autobiographical memories. The authors
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 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REASONING 13

argue that these arguments serve the identity function of establishing per-
sonal continuity across change. Building on Pasupathi’s earlier work on
listener effects on autobiographical memory and expanding Fivush’s work
on mother–child memory talk in preschool children to adolescence, the
authors then develop ideas on how socializing interactions might support
adolescents’ emerging ability for autobiographical reasoning. Excerpts
from mother–daughter discussions of the adolescent’s personal develop-
ment illustrate these ideas.
In Chapter Four, Robyn Fivush, Jennifer Bohanek, and Widaad
Zaman focus on how narrating in families supports adolescents develop-
ing life story and self-concept, and how it supports their well-being.
Exceptionally daring for psychologists, they analyze naturally occurring
dinner table conversations in families with adolescents. Only this kind of
data can show how relevant narratives are in real life. Indeed, narratives
make up not the majority of ongoing family talk, but a substantial part of
it. Most interestingly, intergenerational stories about the parents’ lives
prior to their children’s recollection were surprisingly frequent. Inter-
viewed individually about intergenerational narratives, adolescents were
easily able to provide such stories from both their parents’ lives and, by
way of autobiographical reasoning, to intertwine them with their own life
story. In addition, interesting gender differences emerged.
In Chapter Five, Anne McKeough and Jennifer Malcolm present their
work on how social-cognitive development (in terms of Case’s neo-Piage-
tian theory) is applied to the understanding of and drawing inferences
from fictional stories across adolescence, thereby bridging cognitive and
narrative development. They then go on to show that parallel to general
cognitive development and to the development of understanding fictional
stories, adolescents develop an understanding of family stories that are
told repeatedly by parents. In re-narrations of these stories and subsequent
clinical interviews, adolescents show a progressing ability for autobio-
graphical reasoning by interpreting the stories and excerpting a moral
from them also with the use of metaphor. The authors bridge both general
cognitive development and narrative understanding, as well as the under-
standing of fictional and real-life stories.
In Chapter Six, Raymond Mar, Joan Peskin, and Katrina Fong write
about a much-neglected topic in psychology, the meaning and possible
effects of fictional literature on the minds and lives of adolescents. They
eloquently argue for the role that reading fiction has in developing an
understanding of how lives are constructed, of how motivation and per-
sonality develop biographically, and of how individuals may remain the
same despite change. Second, they also provide strong arguments for why
reading poetry may enhance adolescents’ abilities to extract themes from a
life and to create thematic coherence using metaphor. Despite the lack of
direct evidence, the authors succeed in constructing indirect evidence
from this much under-researched field of psychology that can actually be
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14 THE DEVELOPMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REASONING

read as a call for future studies that directly test the possible influence of
reading literature.
In Chapter Seven, Kate McLean and Cade Mansfield move from the
different manifestations and the development of autobiographical reason-
ing to the possible effects of autobiographical reasoning. I believe that it
is not only a dearly held conviction of psychoanalysts, but also a funda-
mental belief of many educated people, which is deeply rooted in Euro-
pean and American intellectual and cultural tradition, that trying to
understand yourself and your life is both morally required and good for
yourself and others. McLean and Mansfield partially undermine this
assumption by discussing evidence that at least limits its validity. They
argue that in some circumstances, in some social contexts, and at specific
ages, autobiographical reasoning might be detrimental rather than benefi-
cial to the individual. The authors show that once the core concept and
the main developmental line of autobiographical reasoning have been
established, studying multiple uses in different contexts will be the next
step to take.

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TILMANN HABERMAS is a professor of psychoanalysis at Goethe University,

Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
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