“In Eighty Stories Around the Human Life”. The Psychological Time Binding Strategies in the (auto)BIOGRAPHICAL Narrative GAME
“In Eighty Stories Around the Human Life”. The Psychological Time Binding Strategies in the (auto)BIOGRAPHICAL Narrative GAMEq

Summary/Abstract: The theoretical construct of balanced time perspective provides a valuable context for the process of searching the possibilities of its psychological applications. The possibilities could be connected not only with the therapeutic, but also with the preventive and educational fields of psychology. Some of the tools for achieving a balanced time perspective belong to existentially-oriented narrative psychology. This article presents one of them, created by myself, a narrative psychological tool for supporting adult development, which is titled Eighty Stories around the Human Life. The (auto)BIOGRAPHICAL Narrative GAME. This method is composed of such elements as a box of 100 coloured copyright playing cards with a dice, The Book of Stories, The Manualwith exercises, and The Hypertextual Life-Story Map. All these interconnected game parts had been prepared for the purpose of supporting the receivers’ (“players’”) decisions about the content and sequence of an auto-narrative reconstruction of their lives. One of the most important strategies behind organizing this process during (and through) the game, is to practice and improve cognitive-emotional skills of recognizing, enriching, and harmonizing different time perspectives. The deliberate binding of the daily time context of actual experience with the past and future dimension of biographical time of life,connected with the transcendent perspective of life itself, leads the players to construct rich, multidimensional, and personally meaningful life story accounts. Selected important psychological functions of such a beneficial story construction and narrative abilities are described. The article is illustrated by presenting selected “game card exercises” proposed as the “narrative stimuli” for examining human lives in the time perspective context. From this point of view, the psychology of timemeets the narrative psychologyin the potentially meaningful cooperation, leading to the relatively new field of “applied psychology of time”.

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