Making sense of traumatic experiences: telling your life with fragile X syndrome

The discourse of individuals with fragile X syndrome has been described as fragmented, tangential, and associatively connected, resulting in autobiographical narratives that are incoherent and difficult to understand. In this article, the authors discuss the case of an adolescent female with moderate mental retardation due to fragile X syndrome. The analysis of her autobiographical stories, rather than being primarily reflective of cognitive impoverishment, reveals a different--narrative--mode of thought. The authors present and examine some of her narratives in terms of their specific functions: communication, coherence, exploration, distancing, and evaluation. Their findings suggest that narrative analysis can be an important complement to traditional neuropsychological assessment.