Paradigmatic Psychology in Narrative Perspective

Structural and conceptual parallels between paradigmatic and narrative discourse are drawn and a single taxonomy of genres is applied to each. In particular, we argue that narrative depictions of person, place, and time, as reflected in Bakhtin's account of novelistic genres, find their parallels in the paradigmatic discourse of scientific psychology. In the first part of the paper we provide illustrations of the application of Bakhtin's description of narratives of adventure and ordeal to naturalistic and experimental reports in psychology. In the second part of the paper we turn to the theoretical discourse of psychology and illustrate the relevance of Bakhtin's historical typology of the Bildungsroman to various ways in which the notion of development is inscribed in psychological theory. In each case we consider the ways in which implicit narrative structures and themes enable and constrain practice and theory in paradigmatic science.