Contribution
The essay restates narrative identity, the construct McAdams introduced in 1985 and defined with McLean in 2013, and sets it in four frames: human evolution, individual development, individual differences and culture. The essay’s own addition is the thesis of its title. Borrowing Boyd’s phrase about the species, it argues that in an individual life “we invent stories to make sense of our own lives. And then these stories change us.”
Key insight
A person’s identity, in the psychologist’s sense of what unifies a life and gives it purpose, is a story the person tells. The story is selective, invented and borrowed from culture. It is still consequential, because once it exists the person reads their own choices through it. Narrative identity is the third of three layers of self. Traits (the actor) and goals (the agent) come first and do not go away. The story (the author) arrives in adolescence and takes in the other two.
Assumptions
- Storytelling is an evolved, social capacity. “Stories exist to be told” and are “nearly always about social life, about intentional human agents”. Their evolutionary function is to simulate social experience and to coordinate groups. This is supported by citation (Boyd, Mar & Oatley, Wilson, Henrich, Harari) and by one field study (Smith et al. 2017, the Agta). The selection story itself is not tested.
- Identity in Erikson’s sense. Identity is “a sense of sameness and continuity across different social roles and over time”. McAdams takes the life story to be the form that identity takes.
- Coding of interview narratives measures something stable. The variation section rests on validated coding systems for life-story interviews (cited to McAdams & Manczak 2015). Their validity is assumed here, not argued.
Key results
No new data. The findings it reports, all cited:
- Development. Autobiographical memory emerges “in the third year of life”; parents scaffold children’s self-narration. Retrospection and prospection share brain systems, and the default mode network is proposed as “part of the infrastructure … that has evolved to support the invention of life stories”. Autobiographical reasoning grows from adolescence “through late midlife”. By the early 20s most people have a narrative identity.
- Variation. Agentic life stories go with well-being. In psychotherapy, change toward agency “predict[s] and precede[s]” symptom decline (Adler 2012). The redemptive self has five themes: early advantage, suffering of others, moral steadfastness, redemption and prosocial goals. It is associated with generativity, well-being and “positive emotionality, altruism, resilience, and achievement-striving”. Narrative incoherence is reported in schizophrenia and some personality disorders.
- Culture. Master narratives have five features (after McLean & Syed 2015): utility, ubiquity, invisibility, a compulsory nature and rigidity. East–West differences in children’s and adults’ autobiographical narration are reported. Three explanations are offered: Confucian tradition, rice versus wheat agriculture (Talhelm et al. 2014) and modernity (Greenfield; Taylor; Giddens).
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Narrative identity is an internalized, evolving life story that gives a life unity, purpose and temporal coherence | definitional, the field’s standard statement | p. 2, after McAdams & McLean 2013 |
| C2 | The self develops as actor, then agent, then author, and the life story arrives in adolescence and young adulthood | moderate: the developmental milestones are cited; the three-layer scheme is McAdams’s framework | pp. 5–8; McAdams 2013 |
| C3 | Stories with agentic and redemptive themes go with well-being and generativity, and narrative change can precede improvement in therapy | moderate as reported (correlational plus one longitudinal study); not examined here | pp. 9–10; Adler 2012; McAdams & Guo 2015 |
| C4 | Storytelling, and so narrative identity, is an evolved adaptation for sociality | weak: a plausible evolutionary narrative, with one field study | pp. 2–5 |
| C5 | Individuals assemble their life stories from their culture’s master narratives | moderate as a framework; supported by cross-cultural differences cited | pp. 11–14 |
Concepts
- Narrative identity: “a person’s internalized and evolving story of how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming”.
- Autobiographical reasoning: deriving themes, causal links, turning points and lessons from episodic memories (Habermas & Bluck 2000).
- Actor, agent, author: the three layers of the psychological self, with traits and roles, goals and values, and the life story.
- Redemptive self: a life-story pattern in which suffering leads to a positive outcome, framed by early advantage and prosocial goals.
- Master narrative: “a cultural script that is readily accessible to members of a particular axis of identity” (Hammack 2008).
Connections
It cites the philosophical narrative view through Ricoeur and Schechtman (LIT-468). It treats Schechtman’s author, character and reader as a “tripartite operation” also found in reading fiction (Carroll 2018). It does not engage the philosophical critics of narrative identity. Strawson’s “Against Narrativity” (LIT-452) is not cited, though the essay’s own remark that some people are more “oriented toward narrative identity” than others touches his claim that some people are not narrative at all.
Its “motivated agent” layer is the psychology of goals and plans that the record reads philosophically in Bratman (LIT-567). Its claim that a story “provides a life with unity and purpose” is the narrative candidate for the cross-temporal unity that Bratman’s chapter explains instead through plans. Bratman, in that chapter, calls narrative unity a tempting idea that applies to “many cases” but is not the “more basic cross-temporal unity”.
Bearing on the record
- A THEORY, filed as THEORY-060 (Proposed). As proposed: a life story constructed in adolescence is the form a person’s diachronic identity takes, and its content (agency, redemption, coherence) shapes later well-being. Sources would be this essay, LIT-572 once read, and Adler 2012. Against it stand Strawson (LIT-452) and Bratman’s planning account (LIT-567). The second half is empirical and would need the cited longitudinal studies read first-hand.
- THEORY-044 and THEORY-051. The RFT account places “the narrative self” as the conceptualized self, the content of verbal relations about oneself. McAdams’s narrative identity is a developed version of that content. ACT treats attachment to it as a source of inflexibility. McAdams treats its construction as a developmental achievement. The two are compatible only if holding a story and being fused with it are distinguished. Neither source draws that distinction.
Limitations
- A review essay for a humanities-facing journal. Every empirical claim is cited, and the strength of the cited studies cannot be judged from it.
- The evolutionary section is explicitly speculative (“must have”, “may have”). The essay gives no evidence that narrative identity, as opposed to storytelling, is an adaptation.
- The well-being findings are correlational except Adler (2012). The essay does not discuss whether the story causes well-being or reports it.
- It concedes that the idea of “having” a life story may be “a cultural construction that resonates well with the sensibilities of the modern world”. That qualifies the universality of C1–C2 and the essay does not resolve it.
Open questions
- Whether people low on narrative orientation (the ANIQ’s low scorers, or Strawson’s Episodics) differ in well-being or self-continuity, which would test the rivalry with LIT-452.
- Whether narrative change precedes symptom change in replications of Adler (2012), as C3 needs.