Meaning making occupies a pivotal position in depth-psychological and clinical discourse, designating the active, constructive process by which individuals, families, and therapeutic dyads impose coherence on disrupted experience—most urgently in the wake of loss, trauma, and existential crisis. The corpus reveals no single unified theory but rather a productive tension among several orientations. Constructivist and narrative identity researchers, represented most fully by Neimeyer, Singer, and their collaborators, treat meaning making as a fundamentally semiotic and storied endeavor: persons are protagonists who organize discrete events into coherent life narratives, and the capacity to integrate tension-laden memories into such narratives correlates reliably with psychological growth and adjustment. Sensorimotor clinicians such as Ogden extend the concept bodily, insisting that meaning is not merely linguistic but physiological—embedded in posture, breath, and arousal states that constrain or enable the revision of core beliefs. From a Jungian quarter, von Franz radicalizes the term entirely: the realization of meaning is a non-discursive, feeling-toned ‘quantum leap’ in the psyche, irreducible to logical order. Family-systemic thinkers like Nadeau document the co-constructed, intersubjective dimension, showing how families weave competing story-threads into shared mythologies around death. Across all these positions, the question of whether meaning is found or invented—and whether its absence constitutes pathology or simply an as-yet-incomplete search—remains the defining tension of the literature.
The realization of ‘meaning’ is therefore not a simple acquisition of information or of knowledge, but rather a living experience that touches the heart just as much as the mind.
Von Franz, following Jung, argues that the realization of meaning is a felt, nondiscursive event—a ‘quantum leap’ in the psyche—irreducible to logical or informational cognition.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
New meaning-making is constrained by the old meanings made of earlier experiences, even in childhood. The little boy with the downcast eyes and collapsed chest who believes he is stupid has been unable to take in new information that could upgrade his meaning-making.
Ogden demonstrates that somatic states—posture, breath, muscular tone—physically enforce prior belief structures, preventing the assimilation of corrective experience and thereby constraining new meaning making.
, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015thesis
The self-narratives that we construct and perform rely on a field of lived discriminations that are tacit and prereflective, incompletely articulated in symbolic speech.
Neimeyer’s constructivist account situates meaning not only in language but in a personal-agentic, presymbolic domain, distinguishing his position from both psychodynamic and radical social-constructionist approaches.
Its organizing concern is how individuals employ narratives to develop and sustain a sense of personal unity and purpose from diverse experiences across the lifespan.
Singer establishes narrative identity research as a sub-discipline whose central project is the study of how meaning making through life-story construction confers personal unity and purpose.
, Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, 2004thesis
One factor that consistently predicted emotional adjustment over the length of the study was the extent to which people were able to find meaning and not the extent to which they were able to make sense of the loss.
Davis’s research, reported in Neimeyer’s volume, distinguishes finding meaning (discovering benefit or significance) from making sense of loss, showing that only the former reliably predicts long-term emotional adjustment.
The need for meaning has been so frequently observed and so urgently pursued by individuals coping with such events that a number of theorists have suggested that finding meaning is critical for successful adjustment.
Davis surveys the theoretical consensus that meaning making is a universal response to severe negative life events, while noting the persistent problem of inconsistent definitions across the bereavement literature.
Meaning making was most linked to memories that expressed some form of tension or conflict, particularly those memories that displayed themes of mortality or relationship.
Empirical findings reported by Singer demonstrate that integrative meaning making is preferentially triggered by memories organized around existential conflict, and that the capacity matures developmentally across the lifespan.
, Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, 2004thesis
Making sense of our lives entails constructing a plausible account of important events, a story that has the ring of narrative truth, regardless of whether it co[rresponds to historical fact].
Neimeyer grounds meaning making in constructivist epistemology, arguing that the narrative truth of a life story—its internal coherence and felt plausibility—matters more than its correspondence to objective fact.
Significant others are the most important players in reality construction and maintenance.
Nadeau frames family meaning making as a collectively constructed process in which systemic interactions among members generate and sustain shared cognitive representations of loss.
, Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Losssupporting
The two families made meaning, intricately weaving their stories together. Troy’s parents, his 21-year-old brother, and his 23-year-old sister came for family grief therapy.
A case vignette illustrates how disparate family systems co-construct meaning around traumatic death through the mutual exchange and integration of narrative accounts.
, Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Losssupporting
The tendency to use integration in both types of memory narratives correlated with stress-related growth. Once again, the ability to see connections and find meaning from traumatic or stressful experiences is associated with personal growth.
Woike and Matic’s data extend the association between integrative meaning making and post-traumatic growth, linking narrative integration to agency-communion dynamics in personality.
, Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, 2004supporting
It is within this narrative matrix that the individual proactively and creatively constructs a reality of meaning.
Drawing on Gonçalves and Kelly, this passage aligns constructivist and narrative frameworks, positioning meaning construction as an active, hermeneutic, socially embedded process.
, Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Losssupporting
Transition stories that stressed integrative lessons about personal mastery or enhanced status (agency) we[re linked to ego development and well-being].
Bauer and McAdams’ findings, synthesized by Singer, show that the quality of meaning made within transition narratives—specifically its integrative depth—tracks ego development and social-emotional maturity.
, Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, 2004supporting
The body’s language itself is richly nuanced, mysterious, and multifaceted. It interfaces with a multitude of systems that together comprise the complex moment-to-moment process of making meaning and forecasting the future.
Ogden, citing Tronick, positions the body as a primary meaning-making system, extending the concept beyond cognition and language to include physiological and behavioral domains.
, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting
Paying attention to the types of meaning being made helps the clinician track the family’s progress in grieving and target certain meanings as the focus of treatment.
Nadeau develops a clinical typology of meanings—including what the death does not mean, religious and philosophical meanings, and lessons learned—as a practical diagnostic framework for grief therapy.
, Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Losssupporting
Clients construct their own meanings. Although therapists assist in the coconstruction of meaning through the therapeutic dialogue it is, ultimately, the personal meanings clients carry away that [matter].
A coconstructivist therapeutic principle affirms client autonomy in meaning construction, positioning the therapist as a dialogic facilitator rather than the author of the client’s significance.
, Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Losssupporting
The meanings they attach can be defined as their cognitive representations of reality. Most of what we do know is from an individual perspective, but individuals do not grieve in a vacuum.
Nadeau introduces a social-cognitive framework for meaning making in grief, emphasizing that cognitive representations of loss are always co-constructed within relational and family contexts.
, Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Losssupporting
Our capacity to turn experience into narrative emerges from a social cognitive developmental process defines another point of intersection for this group of narrative identity researchers.
Singer locates the developmental origins of narrative meaning making in the lifespan tradition, tracing its emergence from Piagetian-Eriksonian cognitive-social maturation.
, Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, 2004supporting
Meaning, on the contrary, implies feeling reactions and ethical decisions; it contains a personal nuance.
Von Franz, elaborating Jung, distinguishes meaning from mere logical order by insisting that genuine meaning is always personally felt, ethically charged, and individually inflected.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
‘Coincidancing,’ the fourth strategy families used to make sense of the loss of a family member, is the term I gave to the ‘meaning of the death. The dancing component of the word was used to capture the interactive nature of this strategy.
Nadeau coins ‘coincidancing’ to describe a family-systemic strategy in which co-occurring events are woven into meaning narratives, highlighting the creative and interactive character of collective grief work.
, Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Losssupporting
He finds richly illustrative case material in the diary of C. S. Lewis, whose reflections on the intermingling of joy and suffering prompt Attig’s own on the way in which we both discover and invent new meaning in the face of loss.
Attig’s contribution to the Neimeyer volume emphasizes that meaning in grief is both discovered and invented—a dialectic that frames meaning reconstruction as a creative as well as receptive act.
, Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Losssupporting
Narrative identity emerges from and remains sensitive to developmental crises throughout our lives.
Singer synthesizes evidence that the salience of self-defining memories shifts with Eriksonian developmental stages, situating meaning making within a lifespan trajectory of identity-relevant concerns.
, Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, 2004aside
The IS attempts to tie together the pieces of a person’s life, trying to work it into a coherent narrative.
Goodwyn’s ‘Invisible Storyteller’ model characterizes the unconscious as a continuous meaning-making agency producing narrative integration through the medium of dreams and spontaneous imagery.
, Understanding Dreams and Other Spontaneous Images: The Invisible Storyteller, 2018aside
We are almost constantly deciding how to spend our time and energy. Of course, some of these decisions are made routinely or mindlessly.
Pargament frames meaning making within his broader theory of religious coping as an expression of the human orientation toward significance, linking purposive behavior to the search for meaning.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001aside
Narrative identity researchers take seriously McAdams’s proposal that ‘identity is a life story.’ That is, individuals’ ongoing sense of self in contemporary Western society coheres around a narrative structure.
Singer’s programmatic statement positions the McAdamsian life-story thesis as the organizing meta-principle of the narrative identity field, within which meaning making is a central operative.
, Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, 2004aside