Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction

TL;DR: In a quiet but consistent way, a new subdiscipline of personality psychology—narrative identity research—has emerged, and it is clear that there is a body of midcareer and younger empirical researchers who place narrative identity at the center of personality.

Abstract: In a quiet but consistent way, a new subdiscipline of personality psychology—narrative identity research—has emerged. Its organizing concern is how individuals employ narratives to develop and sustain a sense of personal unity and purpose from diverse experiences across the lifespan (McAdams, 1985, 1987, 1990, 1993, 1996, 1999, 2001). Partly obscured by its interweavings with clinical, developmental, and cognitive psychology, as well as links to social psychology (e.g., Baumeister, Wotman, & Stillwell, 1993; Gergen, 1992; Sarbin, 1986), and the related social sciences of sociology and anthropology, it has sometimes seemed too diffuse or chameleonlike to identify. Finding allies in philosophy (Ricoeur, 1984), psychoanalysis (Schafer, 1981; Spence, 1982), narrative therapy (White & Epston, 1990) and literature (e.g., Lau, 2002; Bruner & Weisser, 1991), it may have appeared too humanities-oriented to be considered a part of scientific inquiry. With its roots in the personological perspective of Henry Murray (1938), it may have been written off by some as too grand in design and similar to Murray’s noble, but daunting, efforts to capture all of the complexity of human personality. Now, however, it is clear that there is a body of midcareer and younger empirical researchers who place narrative identity at the center of personality. In the language of McAdams’s (1995) framework of personality, this group draws on Level 1 ‘‘Trait’’ measures,