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Chapter 10 - Vicarious Life Stories

Concepts, Findings, and Social Functions

from Part II - How the Environment of Autobiographical Memory Shapes the Life Story

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2025

By
Dorthe Kirkegaard Thomsen  and
David B. Pillemer
Edited by
Christin Camia  and
Annette Bohn
Christin Camia
Affiliation:
Zayed University Abu Dhabi
Annette Bohn
Affiliation:
Aarhus University
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Summary

Vicarious life stories are mental representation of other people’s life stories that integrate the other person’s past with the person’s lived present and projected future, for example “my mother’s story.” Taking as our starting point the influential paper by Habermas and Bluck (2000), which pointed to parallels between personal and vicarious life stories, we expand the conceptual space for vicarious life stories to include vicarious life story schema, vicarious memory and future projection, and biographical reasoning. We then discuss the potential differences between vicarious and personal life stories, including their different sources (direct experience versus conversation). In the second part of the chapter, we review empirical studies showing that vicarious life stories are related to personal life stories and discuss the possible explanations for these relations, as well as associations between vicarious life stories and mental health. Finally, we argue that vicarious life stories serve unique social functions in attachment relationships and in supporting sophisticated perspective-taking as a part of empathic understanding of the other person.

Keywords

Vicarious life storiesfunctionsperspective-takingattachment

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Chapter
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Autobiographical Memory and the Life Story
New Perspectives on Narrative Identity
 , pp. 196 - 220
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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