Autobiography

Autobiography is among the most important and valuable vehicles for exploring the human realm in all of its depth, complexity, and richness. Although there are numerous ways to define and conceptualize autobiography, for current purposes it may be considered the specific kind of text that results from the first-person interpretive reconstruction of either a life in its [Page 46]entirety or a significant portion of it, with the aim not merely of recounting “what happened when” but also of understanding, from the vantage point of the current time, the meaning and movement of the past. Located whenever and wherever such interpretive reconstruction occurs—whether in the context of questionnaires, interviews, or those larger literary texts that may be created when an individual takes the time to explore his or her life in its full measure via writing—autobiography is perhaps the primary inroad to the elusive phenomenon of the self, at least as it has emerged in the context of Western history and culture. It is for this reason that during the early part of the 20th century the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, among others, underscored the profound importance of autobiography for the Geisteswissenschaften (the human sciences); insofar as the human sciences were to be founded on methods and modes of inquiry suitable for exploring the distinctively human realm, autobiographical understanding would play a leading role in the project.

Autobiography came to play a prominent role in psychoanalysis—in the “personology” of figures such as Gordon Allport and Henry Murray, in certain strands of anthropological and sociological research (including “autoethnography” in which the researcher's own autobiography serves as the focus of interest), and (most recently) in “narrative inquiry,” a portion of which considers life stories, in their myriad forms, uniquely suited to exploring issues ranging from selfhood and identity to the process of development throughout the life course to the social/cultural “construction” of human lives. With respect to the qualitative research enterprise, autobiography's virtues are many. Foremost among them are what might be termed its ontological wholeness, temporal wholeness, enculturedness, hermeneutic multivocality, and (perhaps most centrally) embeddedness within the fabric of narrativity.

Autobiography is among the most “unrestricted” sources of qualitative data; rather than being limited to some specific behavior or characteristic or region of meaning, its ontological scope is the whole of a life, that is, anything and everything about that life that is meaningful and significant enough to warrant its being told. Drawing on autobiography in qualitative research, thus, lends itself to an “idiographic” perspective in which the individual, in all of his or her complexity, is the preferred unit of analysis.

Autobiography also embodies temporal wholeness; by depicting either a significant portion of a life or a life in its entirety, its interpretive reach is capacious. Rather than isolating the individual from the flow of life, autobiography is oriented toward the flow of life itself, its continuities and its changes, its identity in time and its possible dispersion. Insofar as the human person cannot be known except in the unfolding of his or her unique and unrepeatable history, autobiography may be seen as the privileged path to such knowledge. It should be emphasized in this context that neither ontological wholeness nor temporal wholeness entails the supposition that autobiographies—and selves—are unified and coherent; autobiographies vary markedly in their degree of coherence, as do selves. Whether unified and coherent or less so, these dual conditions of wholeness remain.

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