Remythologizing culture: Narrativity, justification, and the politics of personalization

Abstract

The thesis that the self is a story unfolding in prescriptive space is typically embraced by social constructionists as a radical alternative to naturalistic accounts of human development. Yet, the Tree of Knowledge (ToK) System proposed by Henriques (2003) implies that events at multiple levels of analysis (i.e., matter, life, mind, and culture) can be considered as conditions of possibility for the emergence of meaningful personal narratives. Thus, the ToK System represents an opportunity to recast the work of naturalists and social constructionists in a framework that is at once scientific and humanistic. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol.