Meaning-making

In psychology, meaning-making is the process of how persons construe, understand, or make sense of life events, relationships, and the self. Through meaning-making, persons are "retaining, reaffirming, revising, or replacing elements of their orienting system to develop more nuanced, complex and useful systems".

The term is widely used in constructivist approaches to counseling psychology and psychotherapy, especially during bereavement in which persons attribute some sort of meaning to an experienced death or loss. The term is also used in educational psychology.

Psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, founder of logotherapy in the 1940s, posited in his 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning that the primary motivation of a person is to discover meaning in life. Frankl insisted that meaning can be discovered under all circumstances, even in the most miserable experiences of loss and tragedy. He said that people could discover meaning through doing a deed, experiencing a value, and experiencing suffering. Although Frankl did not use the term "meaning-making", his emphasis on the making of meaning influenced later psychologists.

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, both of whom were educational critics and promoters of inquiry education, published a chapter called "Meaning Making" in their 1969 book Teaching as a Subversive Activity. The chapter proposed a constructivist philosophy of education (but without using the term "constructivist"), and described why the authors preferred the term "meaning making" to any other metaphor for teaching and learning.

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