Abstract

AFONSO, João A.  and  DINIZ, António M.. Um viver feminino no interior rural português: Descrição analítica do tecer de uma história individual. Aná. Psicológica [online]. 2010, vol.28, n.2, pp.295-310. ISSN 0870-8231.

Contextualized by an integrative view of personality, identity emerges as an individual necessity, search and construction of meaning in time and place. It’s in the culture, and in the creative appropriation of the plots it carries, that the individual finds unity and self-conscience. Inherent to this effort of identity cohesion, tapestry where disagreeing aspects of the self achieve new forms of coherence is the notion of personal history. It’s in the permanent elaboration of a self’s narrative that the subject rebuilds his past, perceives his present, and anticipates his future. Hence, life histories (LH) emerge as an exemplar showcase of this process, method that, by its qualities, allows access to the subjective weave of a life that is also the carrier of a culture. The participant, a woman inhabitant of an impoverished, aged and abandoned Portuguese rural interior, arises as one of the last witnesses of a cultural system where the strength and preponderance of the traditional scripts ensures identity integration. In the present work, the harvest and content analysis of her LH allows to reveal the striking influence of the catholic ideological setting on the way she wove her identity narrative.

Keywords : Aging; Identity; Life history; Psychobiography.

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