SpringerBriefs in Psychology Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science Andrea Smorti The Role of Unexpected Events in Stories J. Bruner’s and C. Feldman’s Florentine Seminar SpringerBriefs in Psychology SpringerBriefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science SpringerBriefs present concise summaries of cutting-edge research and practical applications across a wide spectrum of fields. Featuring compact volumes of 50 to 125 pages, the series covers a range of content from professional to academic. 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Andrea Smorti The Role of Unexpected Events in Stories J. Bruner’s and C. Feldman’s Florentine Seminar Andrea Smorti Department of Education, Languages, Intercultures, Literatures and Psychology University of Florence Florence, Italy ISSN 2192-8363 ISSN 2192-8371 (electronic) SpringerBriefs in Psychology ISSN 2626-6741 ISSN 2626-675X SpringerBriefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science ISBN 978-3-031-19336-1 ISBN 978-3-031-19337-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19337-8 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. 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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface A book often takes shape thanks to the confluence of several sources that intersect, overlap and make it move in one direction rather than another. There is, of course, an underlying motivation that pushes the writer to pick up the pen, but often it is the very fact of starting to write that is the main driving force behind the navigation: writing takes time – even historical time – during which thoughts of which one was unaware come to life and take shape from those already put down on paper; more- over, events inside and outside the writer lead him to reflect on new aspects or to consider events already known differently. This is what happened to me. The decision to write this book was first of all born from the desire to make pub- lic the text of the seminar entitled “Narratives and Cultural Psychology” held by Jerome Bruner and Carol Fleisher Feldman on May 11th and 12th 2000 in Florence. The idea of organizing the seminar had emerged during the sabbatical year that Jerome Bruner was carrying out at the University of Florence at the Department of Psychology between 1999 and 2000. In those years, it was particularly evident how narrative was occupying a space at the crossroads of different scientific fields: Anthropology, History, Jurisprudence, Psychoanalysis, Education and, of course, Psychology. Even Medicine recognized in itself narrative aspects such as those involving the memory of the doctor or the relationship among patient, doctor and family. All of this was very interesting because it allowed one to share questions and scientific concerns with colleagues from other disciplines, to examine perspectives different from one’s own, and even to find common concepts of reference. Something like this had already happened decades earlier with the Systems Theory that had been applied to different domains of knowledge, from physical sci- ences to humanities. Within psychology itself, narration had now become a concept that allowed to reformulate, according to a new frame of reference, classical con- structs on the mind such as memory, language, thought and Self, thus allowing to review, sub specie narrativa, a large mass of research carried out in these fields. At the same time, since narratives are part of both personal and collective world, they are the property of the individual but also of society, they introduce us to the world of culture and, in this regard, Cultural Psychology seemed to be a particularly v vi Preface suitable perspective for dealing with this type of problem. That’s why the seminar was entitled: “Narratives and Cultural Psychology”. Undertaking a study of narrative within cultural processes raises several prob- lems, one of which is entering into an intricate system of connections and meanings in which each concept refers to something else in an infinite circuit of significations. When adopting a hermeneutic and narrative perspective, what about concepts such as truth and reality? If individuals and cultures have a specificity that makes them inevitably different from one another, how should they be compared and how should they be measured? How then clearly set up the relationships between narratives minds and cultures? Although the memory of that seminar remained in me far from silent and influ- enced the way I worked on narratives in the following years, it is curious that this text took so many years – from 2000 to 2022 – to come to light. Perhaps my friend- ship with Jerry and Carol and the latter’s sudden and untimely death1 made it diffi- cult for me to realize early on how important the transcription and the edition of the seminar like that was and that there is a difference between what is said and what is written that is worth exploring. The things one says, for example during a public discussion, without writing them down first and calmly in the silence of one’s study room, have this interesting thing about them: their unrepeatability. Certain things are said – and said in a certain way – precisely because they took place within a conversation with concrete ‘others’ in a way that cannot happen in the writing of an article or a book where interaction only takes place with hypothetical readers. Making this seminar public therefore meant constructing, from an oral discourse, a written text, devoid of those voices and intonations given by the ‘here and now’, more rigid than an oral text but better observable and analysable. Not only that, but when speaking, the presuppositions that cannot be concealed in the written text are not always made explicit. When a seminar, which took place in a specific historical moment and in a specific environment, is made public, it needs to be accompanied by an explanation of its references and theoretical assump- tions. Therefore, given that the seminar took place in that specific moment of Jerome Bruner’s and Carol Feldman’s lives, it was useful for its understanding to highlight the studies they were conducting at that time as well as to accompany the text with a framework that would contextualize it and in some way clarify all those passages in the text that could have been implicit, ambiguous and referentially opaque. Thus, I thought of providing the text with a sort of commentary paratext. But in doing this, in editing the written text and commenting on the various passages, it became increasingly clear what the central point of the entire work was, the pivot around which, as in a wheel, the other concepts that were gradually developed by Bruner and Feldman and in the discussion revolved. This pivot slowly became the protagonist of the work I was doing both in the editing of the seminar and in my reflections. 1 Carol Fleisher Feldman died in 2006 in Italy ten years before the death of her husband, Jerome Bruner, in 2016 at his home in New York City. Preface vii What I am referring to is the concept of the “unexpected event” that actually inspired the title and gave the imprint and physiognomy to this book. However, I am not sure that the expression “unexpected event” expresses all the richness of the connections it has with very different perspectives and fields of investigation. In fact, Greek tragedy, the study of risk in the medical field, the theory of information and probability, developmental psychology and neuroscience, law and cultural psychology, history and literature, all refer to the notion of an unex- pected event, and in each discipline, the unexpected event takes on different forms and names: peripeteia, adverse event, information, black swan, rare event, violation of expectation and cognitive incongruity are just some of the names given to unex- pected events. Of all these Bruner, during the seminar, seems to prefer the term, taken from tragedy, of peripeteia. We will return to this point in the course of this book, but already this choice indicates how the study of poetics and narrative can be of help to the study of the mind. Thus, the structure of this book was defined only as we went along, and one of its aims was precisely to fully exploit the concept of peripeteia, which in my opin- ion has been the subject of too little reflection in the study of narrative psychology. This seminar has, among others, the merit of re-proposing the concept of peripeteia as a key to understanding a number of other problems inherent not only in the world of stories but also in that part of life that is born from stories and from which sto- ries come. But there is another reason that helped give this book its final form. It is the fact that in the course of its writing, two human cataclysms occurred in the history of our world: the second COVID-19 pandemic crisis in 2021–2022 and the war in Ukraine. The second COVID pandemic was preceded by a first crisis that effectively pre- sented itself as an adverse event, a negative and unexpected event. But, in truth, if the future is predicted, at least in part, on the basis of the past, something went wrong in the collective memory. Indeed, how was it possible to remove such a long history of pandemics, from the Black Death, to Smallpox, to the Spanish Flu that claimed 50 million victims at the beginning of the twentieth century? Not to forget the Asian Flu, HIV and so on. The second pandemic crisis, on the other hand, occurred in a context that was already known, and it was possible to foresee its development because, in the meantime, vaccines had been discovered and the majority of the European population had at least undergone the first dose of vaccine. As for the war in Ukraine, it too was an unexpected event although, again, one could argue that wars have always been part of human history and are currently being fought in many parts of the world. Just to give a few examples, in Ethiopia there is a war between the government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front; in Somalia between government forces and terrorist organisations (ISIS, Al Qaeda); in Yemen between Shiites and Sunnis; in Syria between the government of Bashar al- Assad and the autonomous administration of Kurdish-majority North and East Syria. However, the short-sightedness of the Western world – to which I belong – has made them appear distant, human tragedies, certainly, but in the face of which one can always change the channel or close the newspaper. viii Preface The war in Ukraine immediately appeared as a ‘different’ war. First, Ukraine is a land that occupies a central position in Europe because of its history and the wealth it has above and below its soil. Then it is closer to the affluence and comforts of our cities, with their youthful nightlife, microwave ovens and the comfort of heated and well-equipped homes. Thus it soon foreshadowed far greater concrete threats such as an energy and food crisis, the emigration of large population masses, the spread of a new pandemic, a social and economic cataclysm and, above all, the nuclear phantom. What do humans do particularly when faced with adverse events such as pan- demic and war? The first of all is to tell and then tell, tell and tell. “Witnesses” are sent to places affected by conflicts, they observe and record, interview, document and then tell what happens when a person gets sick or a bomb explodes. Of course, governments make political, social, economic and health choices, doctors, nurses, soldiers and other rescue forces act concretely to face the dangers but the first thing that is done and remains a permanent activity during the course of events is the construction of stories. It takes on many different functions: it is told to make people aware of “facts” that have happened, to provide “interpretations” of these facts, to anticipate what might happen, to make hypotheses, to build theories, to remember the past and to influence public opinion so that this change goes in the direction wanted by that newspaper, by that political party and by that government. All these functions therefore contain a pragmatic intent, and we can easily see how stories are an integral part of propaganda, becoming nothing less than “weap- ons” just as violent as cannons or missiles. In fact, stories are able to move entire populations and governments in such a cogent way that some political commentator has even stated that through fake news, which nowadays acquire an even more extraordinary strength thanks to electronic media, it will be possible to act belli- cosely with as much or more effectiveness than with military means because it will be possible to convince entire nations to arm themselves and take sides. Although stories serve different functions they share some elements in common. When we tell a story we communicate to others what is happening on two levels. We tell the reality “as if” it were an objective reality, but, at the same time, we tell it from the point of view of the narrator, that is there is always a subjective aspect that is expressed in a “I tell you how reality is”. This “I” in telling the reality also pro- vides the interpretation through the choice of words, syntax and comments, offering a first way for the listener to understand the so-called facts. After the stories there are scientific analyses, numbers, tables, graphs and all the apparatuses aimed at further clarifying what this reality is, which, however, in turn, give rise to other stories on scientific analyses, numbers, tables, etc. In the moment in which the stories transmit otherwise unknown realities, or even when they speak of known events, this being directed to someone, and this telling to be understood and to persuade provokes different reactions in the listener. Everyone interprets these stories in a personal way and, commenting on them, builds other stories. From one story told, especially through the media, come a hundred, a thousand, a million other stories that approach or move away from each other as you see in the sky when flocks of birds move and form clouds that merge and separate according to Preface ix inscrutable paths. This is how movements of opinion are created, groupings of sto- ries that can form groups of opinion. Each group recognizes itself in some common stories and in their interpretations which are nothing but stories of stories, narrative comments such as the reasons that led to the outbreak of World War II, the Cuban crisis, the assassination of J.F. Kennedy, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the twin towers, and, more recently, the pandemic of Corona virus and the invasion of Ukraine. All these stories and inter- pretations of stories end up forming the collective identity of groups, political par- ties, entire peoples. It arouses a premonitory effect than to reread the written text of the seminar held by Bruner and Feldman in the 2000s, at the beginning of a third millennium that would mark a turning point in relations between Western and Middle Eastern coun- tries: a year before the attack on the Tween Towers and the beginning of the war in Afghanistan that would lead to the killing of Osama Bin Laden, the invasion of Iraq (2003) with the capture, the sentence and the execution of Saddam Hussein, the bombing in Libya with the death of Gaddafi (2011) and then the war in Syria, until you get to the war conflict in Europe itself between Russia and Ukraine, a conflict that risks pitting even larger parts of the globe, a clash of West versus East world at a time when the idea of globalization, of interconnection in terms of markets, sources of energy, consumer goods, tourism and values made the emergence of a war increasingly distant and unlikely and made Fukuyama talk of “the end of his- tory”. But, we know by now, these are the “black swans”, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb called them, events that humans tend not to predict. Although this seminar is not about war, but about stories and cultural psychol- ogy, it will not be difficult to see the role of adverse events and how essential the commentary function of stories is within groups. Florence, Italy Andrea Smorti