Review of General Psychology 2001 Vol 5 No 2 100 122 Copyright 2001 by the Educational Publishing Foundation 1089 2680 0I 5 00 DOI 10 1037 I089 2680 5 2 100 The Psychology of Life Stories Dan P McAdams Northwestern University Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest among theorists and researchers in autobiographical recollections life stories and narrative approaches to understanding human behavior and experience An important development in this context is D P McAdams s life story model of identity 1985 1993 1996 which asserts that people living in modern societies provide their lives with unity and purpose by constructing internalized and evolving narratives of the self The idea that identity is a life story resonates with a number of important themes in developmental cognitive personality and cultural psychology This article reviews and integrates recent theory and research on life stories as manifested in investigations of self understanding autobiographical memory personality structure and change and the complex relations between individual lives and cultural modernity Once upon a time psychologists viewed life stories as little different from fairy tales charming even enchanting on occasion but fundamentally children s play of little scientific value for understanding human behavior Psychoanalysts might ponder the dream stories their clients told Freud 1900 1953 and a few maverick researchers might ask a participant to tell a story in response to a picture cue now and again H A Murray 1938 but serious scientists did not concern themselves with fantasies stones and myths The notion of a life story might conjure up associations with case studies e g Allport 1965 psychobiographies Erikson 1958 and other highly suspect ventures in idiographic speculation Although there might be nothing wrong in principle with a scientist s trying to understand the story of an entire human life Runyan 1982 R White 1952 what should a scientist do next once he or she understood one Everybody knows that the idiosyncratic vagaries of the single case cannot be generalized to a population Holt 1962 In sum stories are too soft and human lives too big as well as too singular One should not be surprised therefore if life stories attracted only the most romantic of psychological investigators Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dan P McAdams Foley Center for the Study of Lives Northwestern University 2115 North Campus Drive Evanston Illinois 60208 Electronic mail may be sent to dmca noithwestem edu But things began to change in the 1980s After a series of searching critiques e g Carlson 1971 Mischel 1968 the field of personality psychology began to look beyond the vicissitudes of the single narrowly defined trait to explore broader issues of central concern for human lives This shift was evidenced in research on the structural organization of all traits e g McCrae Costa 1990 personalized motivations and intrinsic goals e g Cantor Zirkel 1990 Emmons 1986 social cognitive contingencies and dynamics of human behavior e g Mischel Shoda 1995 and the role of autobiography and life narrative in understanding lives in general e g McAdams Ochberg 1988 Singer Salovey 1993 and the single case in particular e g McAdams West 1997 Nasby Read 1997 As personality psychologists began to turn their attention to people s lives they found notions such as story and narrative to be especially useful in conveying the coherence and the meaning of lives Tomkins 1979 McAdams 1985 and Hermans and Kempen 1993 articulated new narrative theories of personality adapting concepts from dramaturgical and literary discourses to the psychology of persons At the same time scientists in developmental McCabe Peterson 1991 social S L Murray Holmes 1994 cognitive Schank Abelson 1995 clinical Howard 1991 counseling Polkinghorne 1988 and industrial organizational Pondy Morgan Frost Dandridge 1983 psychology became increasingly 100 SPECIAL ISSUE PSYCHOLOGY OF LIFE STORIES interested in story concepts and narrative methodologies Psychotherapists began using narrative therapies M White Epston 1990 especially in clinical work with families Eventually the psychological lexicon became filled with such terms as life scripts self narratives story schemas story grammars personal myths personal event memories self defining memories nuclear scenes gendered narratives narrative coherence narrative complexity and the like Today psychologists investigate stories of individual lives MeAdams 1999 stories of intimate relationships Sternberg 1998 and family stories Fiese et al 1999 and they are newly sensitized to the power of societal myths and cultural narratives in shaping human behavior in social contexts Gregg 1991 The proliferation of methods and concepts related to stories and narratives suggests that Sarbin 1986 may have been correct when he predicted that the general idea of narrative could provide a new root metaphor for the field of psychology as a whole In his life story model of identity McAdams 1985 1993 1996 has argued that identity itself takes the form of a story complete with setting scenes character plot and theme In late adolescence and young adulthood people living in modern societies begin to reconstruct the personal past perceive the present and anticipate the future in terms of an internalized and evolving self story an integrative narrative of self that provides modern life with some modicum of psychosocial unity and purpose Life stories are based on biographical facts but they go considerably beyond the facts as people selectively appropriate aspects of their experience and imaginatively construe both past and future to construct stories that make sense to them and to their audiences that vivify and integrate life and make it more or less meaningful Life stories are psychosocial constructions coauthored by the person himself or herself and the cultural context within which that person s life is embedded and given meaning As such individual life stories reflect cultural values and norms including assumptions about gender race and class Life stories are intelligible within a particular cultural frame and yet they also differentiate one person from the next People differ from each other with respect to their self defining life stories in ways that are not unlike how they differ from each other on 101 more conventional psychological characteristics such as traits motives intelligence and so on For example
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