contextualizing the storied self

Contextualizing the Storied SelfAuthor(s): Avril Thorne and Marcia LatzkeSource: Psychological Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1996), pp. 372-376Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1448827 .

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COMMENTARIES

Contextualizing the Storied Self

Avril Thorne and Marcia Latzke Department of Psychology

University of California, Santa Cruz

McAdams makes a compelling case that personality theory and research should focus on the question of the "temporal integration of the Me." The field of personality has had little to say about the holistic, dynamic integration of life experiences. Personality research has focused primarily on individual traits, which McAdams aptly characterizes as timeless and desituated global attributes. Moreover, discussions of the organization of traits have mostly pursued hierarchical organizations from specific to global, and substantive questions about the processes and purposes for which such organization takes place have been few and far between.

Ever since Allport (1937) cast traits as neuropsychic structures, researchers have vigorously pursued personality as a set of biological structures that are more or less wired in. Whereas conceptualizing personality as biologically based traits facilitates equations between infrahumans and humans, conceptualizing personality as the life story focuses attention squarely on human experience because verbal reports are the basis on which the life story emerges. How do persons render individual pieces of life experience into a coherent, credible whole? Only by addressing this question can we begin to fully understand the part of personality-psychosocial identity-that has been missed by most empirical studies of personality.

The question of how personal experience is organized is highly important. But is McAdams's answer sufficient? In considering the strengths and weaknesses of McAdams's approach, we examine three basic as- sumptions on which his perspective is based.

The Purpose of the Life Story

McAdams argues that the purpose of the life story is to form a cohesive identity so that one does not get pulled apart by the deconstructive forces of modernity. Life stories indeed seem to be essential for the unifica- tion of lived experience and for the development of a coherent sense of self. We are also convinced that life stories, now more than ever, seem to be a critical means for constructing identity in modern Western societies. In acknowledging that human identity construction is not universal across cultures or historical eras, McAdams makes an important first step toward understanding the multiple factors that influence the con-

struction of identity. Life stories are more important for constructing identity in modem than traditional cultures due partly to the high mobility of modern cultures, which provide less structure-for example, from omni- present family members-for crafting an identity. With increasing needs to create oneself "on one's own," the life story in modern culture becomes an important way to identify oneself to others and to oneself.

McAdams's emphasis on the "self-making" purpose of life stories is only part of the story, however, for in telling a life story we also construct meanings about ourselves in relation to other people. The transactional features of identity and the life story are more high- lighted in McAdams's (1994a, 1994b) past work than in the present piece, which focuses on the macro level of modern culture moreso than the transactional con- texts in which identity is co-constructed.

Research at the micro level of specific instances of identity construction has revealed that crafting an identity is a ubiquitous developmental task. Whereas McAdams and others (e.g., Erikson, 1963) assume that adulthood is the primary developmental stage for the emergence of self-making, self-making starts much earlier. The urge to unify past experience is felt even in childhood (Fivush & Hudson, 1990; Nelson, 1993). Children often spill out the events of the day to caretak- ers as they are going to sleep, seeking meanings for the jumbled happenings of the day. Adults urge children to weigh and unify events in their lives-What are your favorite things to do? Who is your best friend? What happened at preschool today? Do you want to go to camp again next year? These kinds of questions move children toward integrating events in their lives into a meaningful whole. Moreover, recent studies of child narratives find that young children's free recall of per- sonally important episodes is consistent with the ways in which adults structure, represent, and interpret such episodes (Hudson, 1990). If childhood is the beginning of the urge to unify one's experience, then studies of the life story and the construction of identity are important at all ages, not just adulthood.

In summary, viewing life stories as a developmental imperative is an empirically more promising way of understanding self-making than is focusing on the modernity imperative. And, perhaps more so than McAdams, we believe that the most fruitful way of understanding this developmental imperative is to ex-

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plore the ways in which life stories and identity are co-constructed in the context of relationships between self and significant others at all stages of the lifespan.

The Unit That Gets Organized

If traits and personal concerns are the unit of analysis for Levels 1 and 2, respectively, what is the basic unit of analysis for Level 3, the life story? McAdams ex- cludes traits, which are too stable and nomothetic, and personal concerns, which individually ebb and flow as a function of situational changes and developmental stages. Instead of staying the same or ebbing and flow- ing, the life story is presumed to show increasing coherence, differentiation, and good form.

The developmental trajectory of the life story is compellingly different from the trajectories of the other two units, suggesting the central involvement of a psychological critter that is not only at some point "stamped in," but is also altered in discernible ways across the lifespan. In addition to being a solid but somewhat plastic presence, this Level 3 critter is more personal- ized than are the other two critters. Instead of being primarily useful for describing the personality of a stranger (traits), or for describing one's personal or strategic concerns at a particular point in time (personal concerns), life stories are primarily useful for temporally organizing one's relatively unique life experiences. Being stories, life stories have beginnings and endings, imagery, ideological settings, motivational themes, key scenes or nuclear episodes, and personal images of the self, or imagoes. A life story could presumably be very long and elaborate or fairly short and sweet.

What is the most basic unit that shares all of these features of the life story? We propose that the "autobiographical memory" is a felicitous basic unit for studying and understanding the development of the life story. Autobiographical memories are narratives of specific, personal experiences that are an enduring element of the self-system (Nelson, 1993). Such memories are psychologically persistent, and they also share the somewhat plastic features of the life story. The same autobiographical memory can be told in different ways, depending, in part, on new insights one achieves about oneself (Crits-Christoph & Luborsky, 1990). A friend of ours, for example, has repeatedly told a story about being abandoned in the desert by her father at age 5. In the last few years, she has slightly altered the way that she tells this story, so that, instead of her father being cast as a devil imago, he is now cast as a frustrated parent-in line with her current situation and antici- pated future. In the present case, certain key elements

remain the same-the setting and the actions in particular-but the motivations, the moral tone, and the imagoes shift in a psychologically positive direction. The change in these imagoes seems precisely the kind of change that McAdams targets as indicative of the positive developmental trajectory that is often inherent in successive permutations of the life story.

Specific autobiographical memories often feature many of the properties that McAdams views as central to the life story, but a specific autobiographical memory does not contain one key feature: explicit linkages with other autobiographical memories. We believe that separating the unit (the autobiographical memory or discrete, spatiotemporally bounded story) from the organization of the units (the integration of specific life stories into a temporally extensive, grand life story that unifies many discrete experiences) brings greater clarity to the task of understanding the process by which one con- structs a life story. The question of how the units of the grand life story are linked together is very different from the question of how particular units of lived experience become memorable. Separating these two questions helps to clarify a murkiness that unnecessarily obscures McAdams's concept of the life story.

Autobiographical memories differ sufficiently from personal concerns and traits that it would seem important to understand the features of the basic Level 3 critter prior to addressing the issue of how such critters are linked together in meaningful ways. Cognitive and developmental psychologists have begun to explore numerous important features of autobiographical memories-their endurance through time, their relative prevalence in various stages of the life course, their structure in childhood, adulthood, and old age, and their psychodynamic, directive, and communicative func- tions (e.g., Pillemer, 1992; Robinson & Swanson, 1990; Rubin, Wetzler, & Nebes, 1986). Moreover, research on autobiographical memory has already begun to fer- tilize understandings of personality development (Mackavey, Malley, & Stewart, 1991; McAdams, Len- sky, Daple, & Allen, 1988; Singer & Salovey, 1993; Thorne, 1995a, 1995b; Thorne & Klohnen, 1993).

Influences on the Organization of the Life Story

In highlighting the role of the macro level of modern culture in challenging self-cohesion and mandating an internalized sense of balance, McAdams seems to downplay the role of the local social context in the crafting of the life story. Instead of identifying external influences in terms of the relational situation in which a particular life story is told, McAdams primarily dis- cusses external influences in terms of the role of "cul-

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ture" and "modernity." Although acknowledging that the life story is a psychosocial construction, McAdams does not, in this piece, dwell on the transactional mo- ment in which a particular life story is constructed.

Life stories are social units that are "exchanged between people, rather than being treasured in solitude in the caverns of the brain" (Linde, 1993, p. 4). This definition of the life story is shared by many linguists, sociologists, and anthropologists, who primarily collect life stories in oral rather than written form. McAdams does not, in this piece, specify that the life story is necessarily an oral product, but his recognition that the life story is a psychosocial construction fundamentally situates the life story in social life. This feature of the life story-as something exchanged between persons-seems to deserve a bit more attention.

The life story is not simply the product of an individual and of a macro culture, any more so than the trait, the personal concern, or the autobiographical memory is sheerly the product of the individual within a macro culture. Indeed, it may be the case that because intensive interviewing is often necessary to elicit the life story, that one's perception of one's relationship with the researcher is more likely to influence the story that is told than is this factor likely to influence one's trait descriptions. Traits, unlike life stories, are assessed with questions about how people "usually" think, feel, and act, and are not elicited in a personal context but rather in an amorphous context, often with groups of partici- pants responding in anonymity. An important question about the process of organization concerns the degree to which the relationship between the teller and the tellee produces a unique life story.

We suspect that the raw material for constructing a life story may shift considerably depending on the person to whom and/or purpose for which one tells the life story. For example, in a recent seminar for college seniors, we asked students to tell 10 autobiographical memories to two different people, separated by several weeks time. Overall, the themes in each set of memories were quite different, and the difference seemed less a function of whether the memories were told in the first or the second interview than the perceived relationship between the interviewee and the interviewer (Thorne, 1995c).

Perhaps the youth of our samples accounts for their shifting array of stories. McAdams primarily focuses on midlife and older samples, for whom the salient events of one's life may be more established. We know that some trait descriptions are likely to be more stable after age 30 than before age 30 (Costa & McCrae, 1994). If the same is true for the life story, then perhaps traits and life stories are more similar cognitive processes than McAdams seems to believe.

If, on the other hand, the life story is a fundamentally different kind of critter than the trait, then the life story may be more plastic than traits and may show as much shift in midlife and old age as do our college students' autobiographical memories. In this case, a grand- mother, for example, would be likely to tell a different life story to a grandchild than to her spouse, because the purpose of the telling would be different. She may be constructing a moral tale to live by to the grandchild but confessing her trespasses to her spouse.

If one tells a different life story to the grandchild and to the spouse, what does this mean for the stability and coherence of identity and the life story? Perhaps even elderly people routinely construct different life stories, each of which represents one facet of their identity. Although people have multiple life stories (just as they have multiple traits, and multiple personal concerns), this does not mean that people lack coherence. Life experience is abundant, with new data continually com- ing in, and it is reasonable to expect that linkages between old and new data will be multiple, changing, and complex.

Although we are compelled by McAdams's sensi- tivity to adult-developmental, subcultural, and cultural influences on the life story, more emphasis on the life story as being co-constructed in a particular social context and for particular relational purposes seems warranted. Rosenwald and Ochberg (1992) were par- ticularly eloquent on this point:

The solitary narrator does not have carte blanche to create coherence in any fashion whatsoever; stories are constrained by the production and expectations of others. Because the stories we tell of our lives invari- ably touch upon the lives of those who matter to us, our self accounts must be coordinated with the accounts others give of us and of themselves. Not that all must tell their stories in unison. But even in the differ- ences a harmony must be audible; the ensemble of voices must add up to a workable whole. (p. 9)

Conclusion

McAdams is seeking the integrated big picture of a person's life-holistic and dynamic, not static and ele- mentistic. In so doing, he identifies a compelling omis- sion in the old grand theories: They looked for a big picture, but they failed to ground that picture in the kinds of situated questions that a half century of researchers subsequently asked. But in pursuing the big picture, McAdams also is missing some of the same terrain that the old grand theorists did. McAdams, like Allport (1937) and Murray (1938), fails to focus on the role of the immediate situation in influencing the con-

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struction of personality. And in focusing on the role of the immediate situation in constructing personality, most personality research has also neglected the transactional terrain that we prefer to tread. Viewing the life story as continually co-constructed is a more holistic and dynamic way of pursuing identity than is viewing personality (and the life story) as a one-way street, a nonreciprocal product of external or internal forces.

In framing the life story as a problem for modern culture, McAdams unnecessarily ambiguates the context in and purpose for which the life story is told. McAdams modernity context is too macro to be very useful for personality research, for it is really quite impossible to get much empirical grip on the forces of modernity when one is studying a modern life story. Although McAdams says that it is important to ground the individual person in his or her "culture and in the sociohistorical setting within which the person's life makes sense," he does not dwell on specifying the nature of that sociohistorical setting or its optimal temporal and spatial unit, features that we feel are essential for understanding how the life story emerges and evolves.

The notion of culture as a bounded collective sym- bolic system is now being criticized by anthropologists. Cultural boundaries are not absolute, but are socially constructed and maintained through social exchange (Barth, 1989; Eriksen, 1993; Linger, 1994; Onishi, 1995). "Context," on the other hand, immediately sug- gests the setting in which the story is told, the person to or for whom the story is told, the purpose for which the story is told. The immediate social context is the stuff of ethnographic research, and it is ethnographic, transactional research that is likely to differentiate dynamic studies of identity and the life story from the prior era in which we have mostly studied persons from an objectivist, mechanistic, nonreciprocal point of view (Altman & Rogoff, 1987; Cooper, 1987; Pepper, 1942).

Life stories, as well as traits and personal concerns, are co-constructed implicitly or explicitly with other people. We learn about our abilities and our identities by being pestered with questions about who we are from other people, by presenting ourselves to other people, by negotiating our identity with that of others. These co-constructions belie the felicity of a grand cultural or modernity explanation, as well as a biological explanation. Hunkering down with persons as they tell their life stories and being sensitive to the ways in which we reciprocally influence the telling of life stories is a highly productive way to understand the process of selfing. To whom and for whom does the I construct the Me? Are the I and the Me enough? Must not we also include the You?

Notes

Preparation of this commentary was funded by fac- ulty grants from the Social Sciences Division and the Academic Senate of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Avril Thorne and Marcia Latzke, Department of Psychology, 277 Social Sciences II, University of Cali- fornia, Santa Cruz, CA 95064.

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Modernity: An Incomplete Picture

Robert L. Woolfolk Department of Psychology

Rutgers University

There is much to commend in McAdams's multilay- ered and erudite piece. It would seem to be one of the few serious attempts to develop a narrative perspective on the self and integrate it into a comprehensive theory of personality. Despite much stylish and attractive rheto- ric from proponents of narrativity, McAdams's theoreti- cal and empirical studies are rare attempts to move beyond orotundity and conduct systematic scientific research on the subject. I believe this work will have major heuristic impact, in inspiring investigators to con- ceptualize studies of the person at a level of analysis that is more molar, more interdisciplinary, and more intellec- tually exciting. This is the kind of social science that is very much in accord with the sensibilities of Wittgen- stein and Winch, while also preserving the appropriate methodological rigor of experimental psychology.

This is an exemplary effort, but one that is also sweeping and ambitious. Inevitably about such endeav- ors, there are some pedantic quibbles one can raise. Let me fulfill my responsibility as a critic and do so now.

McAdams's analysis of modernity is incomplete and somewhat flawed. It seems restricted, for the most part, to an analysis of properties of form related to self-understanding and identity maintenance. What is missing from the analysis is any critical perspective on modernity that incorporates the ironic and tragic dimensions of the modern world.

The critique of modernity has been in progress since the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment. It was a

principal concern of Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, and Heidegger, just to name a few. Some of the best minds of the last two centuries have taken on modernity as a problem to be solved. And even those who show little nostalgia for Gemeinschaft seem to feel that the prob- lematic of modernity involves more extensive chal- lenges than the hardships of keeping one's personal narrative going.

McAdams writes, "One cannot understand the modern adult, male or female, unless one grasps the unique problems and opportunities for the human life course posed by modernity." But there is little evidence in the article that he has thoroughly digested what some of his principal sources have to say about the difficulties in self-formation that are consequences of the modern situation. Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tip- ton (1985), for example, suggested that

a life composed mainly of work that lacks much intrin- sic meaning and leisure devoted to golf and bridge does have limitations. It is hard to find in it the kind of story or narrative, as of a pilgrimage or quest, that many cultures have used to link private and public; present, past, and future; and the life of the individual to the life of society and the meaning of the cosmos. (p. 83)

According to Taylor (1989), the modern ethic of self-expression, self-realization, and self-fulfillment leads to a shallow subjectivism in which

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