Narratives et labour: the contemporary impasse of the narrative of the self through work

Abstract

Narrative is one of the oldest ways of human expression, being conceived by several authors as a means for one’s structuring. Taking narrative as a form of psychological meaning and constitution, we attempt to delimit, inside the emerging field of Psychology that takes narrative as the center of its investigation, the formation of the self through this discursive practice. Being a means for the formation of the self, narrative crosses several atria of human life. One of these privileged fields of personal and social significance is work. However, in the course of history we notice that there is an effort in aligning the concept of work with that of job, effort that is perpetrated by an ideology of security of the job, a reflex of a defined social system, the industrial system. In this context, we notice that, at present, the category of work is being reformulated; some authors even speculate its disappearance. In this article, we discuss the possibilities of the narrative of self through work in a time when the centralism of the work itself and its existence are in check.

Key words: narrative, narrative of self, centralism of work, work and job.