Identity and Story: Creating Self in Narrative

In Identity and Story: Creating Self in Narrative, the fourth volume in the series "The Narrative Study of Lives," Dan P. McAdams, Ruthellen Josselson, and Amia Lieblich bring together an interdisciplinary and international group of creative researchers and theorists to examine the way the stories we tell create our identities.

An increasing number of psychologists argue that people living in modern societies 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. The detailed examination of excerpts from stories told to researchers and the analysis of published memoirs, together with the contributors’ insights into narrative psychology, make this provocative volume a rich, research-based exploration into how our lives may be the product of the stories we tell.

Part of the Narrative Study of Lives series.

Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction
—Dan P. McAdams, Ruthellen Josselson, and Amia Lieblich

I. Unity Versus Multiplicity

1. Multiplicity and Conflict in the Dialogical Self: A Life-Narrative Approach
   —Peter T. F. Raggatt
2. Between "Being" and "Doing": Conflict and Coherence in the Identity Formation of Gay and Lesbian Orthodox Jews
   —Tova Hartman Halbertal with Irit Koren
3. The Raw and the Bland: A Structural Model of Narrative Identity
   —Gary S. Gregg
4. Creative Work, Love, and the Dialectic in Selected Life Stories of Academics
   —Dan P. McAdams and Regina L. Logan

II. Self Versus Society

5. Identity Light: Entertainment Stories as a Vehicle for Self-Development
   —Kate C. McLean and Avril Thorne
6. Silk From Sows' Ears: Collaborative Construction of Everyday Selves in Everyday Stories
   —Monisha Pasupathi
7. Making a Gay Identity: Life Story and the Construction of a Coherent Self
   —Bertram J. Cohler and Phillip L. Hammack

III. Stability Versus Growth

8. Constructing the "Springboard Effect": Causal Connections, Self-Making, and Growth Within the Life Story
   —Jennifer L. Pals
9. The Identities of Malcolm X
   —John Barresi
10. A Narrative Exploration of Personal Ideology and Identity
    —Ed de St. Aubin, Mary Wandrei, Kim Skerven, and Catherine M. Coppolillo
11. "Where is the Story Going?" Narrative Forms and Identity Construction in the Life Stories of Israeli Men and Women
    —Rivka Tuval-Mashiach

Author Index

Subject Index

About the Editors