Alperovich, V. D. ‘Friends’ and ‘Foes’ in Biographic Narratives of Psychology Students

Abstract: The article is devoted to the phenomenon of ‘friends and foes’ developed by a person in his biographic narrative. Both Russian and foreign psychologists have analyzed the process of self-identification of a hero of a narrative through his interactions with other characters and have described how the others are perceived either as Friends or Foes, ‘us or them’ depending on the ‘Self’ image. The subject under research is a personal development of the ‘Friendor- Foe’ phenomenon in the free narrative genre. Nevertheless, the ‘us or them’ phenomenon in the free narrative is understudied by Russian psychology. The purpose of the present research is to define the contents of the ‘us or them’ category in biographical narrations of different genres. The subject matter of the present research is the peculiarities of the plot and characters in biographical narratives written by psychology students. In her research the researcher uses qualitative methods (interpretation and narrative analysis, i.e. discovery of the structural components of the text and time-space relations based on William Labov; and determination of a narrative genre). The author of the present article is the first one to show that in biographies the accent is made on the pole ‘ours’ in the binary opposition of ‘us or them’ while in fairy tales, love novels, novels about everyday love and essays the accent is made on ‘them’. The researcher is also the first one to offer the empirical support of the hypothesis that the contents of the ‘friends or foes’ category in the biographic narrative may depend on particular features of a plot and characters. The results of the research contribute to the novelty of the research and can be used to analyze the generation mentality as well as in psychotherapy.

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