Paradigmatic psychology in narrative perspective: Adventure, ordeal, and bildung

Structural and conceptual parallels between paradigmatic and narrative disc ourse are drawn and a single taxonomy of genres is applied to each. In part icular, we argue that narrative depictions of person, place, and time, as r eflected in Bakhtin's account of novelistic genres, find their parallels in the paradigmatic discourse of scientific psychology. In the first part of the paper we provide illustrations of the application of Bakhtin's descript ion of narratives of adventure and ordeal to naturalistic and experimental reports in psychology. In the second part of the paper we turn to the theor etical discourse of psychology and illustrate the relevance of Bakhtin's hi storical typology of the Bildungsroman to various ways in which the notion of development is inscribed in psychological theory. In each case we consid er the ways in which implicit narrative structures and themes enable and co nstrain practice and theory in paradigmatic science.