Identity And Story: Creating Self in Narrative

by Dan P. McAdams

An increasing number of psychologists argue that people give meaning to their lives by constructing and internalizing self-defining stories. The contributors to this volume explore how, beginning in adolescence and young adulthood, our narrative identities become the stories we live by. This volume addresses the most important and difficult issues in the study of narrative identity, including questions of unity and multiplicity in stories, the controversy over individual versus societal authorship of stories, and the extent to which stories typically show stability or growth in the narrator.

Genres: Psychology, Writing, Nonfiction, Academic, Philosophy, Narrative

284 pages, Hardcover

First published February 15, 2006

About the author

Dan P. McAdams is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology and Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy. A leading expert in personality psychology and narrative identity, McAdams explores how people construct life stories to shape their sense of self. He is the author of several influential books, including The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (2006), which examines themes of redemption in American life narratives, and The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning (2020), a psychological analysis of Trump's personality. His research has significantly contributed to understanding personality development, identity, and life storytelling.

Reviews

[Kendall · Rating 5 out of 5]

opening sentence: "we are all storytellers and we are the stories we tell." amen.

[Sandeep Gautam · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a new area of personalty psychology for me- how stories and narratives construct identities. I had high hopes from this book as I look up to Dan McAdams work, but this is an edited volume and chapters are of varying quality. While some chapters were absolutely brilliant, others were dense and so -so.

The methodology used was a great and novel learning. With small sample sizes, the various authors will use some sort of structured or unstructured interview or writing prompts to get to the life story narrative of the person and then analyze it mots of the times not blind to the hypothesis or conditions. While on the face of it, the methodologies and sample sizes may make one wonder as to the generalizibility of the results, I found at least some of the results/ findings intriguing and powerful.

[Alexander Christman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I need to own this book.