THEORY-060: A life story constructed from adolescence on is the form a person's diachronic identity takes, and its content shapes later well-being

Which unity, and which word

This account is about narrative unity: the unity a life has as a story. “Diachronic identity” here is identity in Erikson’s sense, “a sense of sameness and continuity across different social roles and over time” (NOTE-470, Assumptions). It is a person’s psychosocial identity, so the account bears on personhood: McAdams adopts Schechtman’s claim that “we constitute ourselves as persons” by narrative (LIT-595, p. 6). It is not a claim about numerical identity over time. Whether the storyteller of forty is the same person as the child of four is Parfit’s question, and the story neither answers it nor needs to.

Nor is it about the self in the record’s sense of a subject. McAdams calls narrative identity the third layer of a “self”, but his self is a developing psychological organisation: traits, then goals, then story. The subject who tells the story is presupposed. That is why the account does not carry self. Where it meets accounts of the self as subject, below, the difference is kept.

Source

• McAdams (2019), LIT-595, read in full in NOTE-470. Page references are to the journal’s pagination.

What was actually shown

The construct. “A narrative identity is a person’s internalized and evolving story of how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming (McAdams and McLean 2013)” (p. 2). It gives a life “unity, moral purpose, and temporal coherence” (p. 1). Once a person has one, “there is no going back” to being only an actor or an agent (p. 8).

When it arrives. Development runs from social actor (self-recognition by about age 2) to motivated agent (goals and theory of mind, the school years) to autobiographical author, in “adolescence and young adulthood” (pp. 6–8). Autobiographical memory, parental scaffolding of children’s self-narration, and autobiographical reasoning, which grows from adolescence into midlife, are cited as the prerequisites (NOTE-470, C2).

Its content matters. Stories with agentic protagonists go with well-being. In Adler’s (2012) longitudinal study of psychotherapy clients, “the changes in the story predict and precede the decline in symptoms and the enhancement of psychological well-being. In other words, the story changes first, and then the storyteller gets better” (p. 10). Midlife adults whose stories resemble “the redemptive self” score high on generativity (p. 10).

Its limits, as McAdams states them. Studies “generally assume that nearly everybody ‘has’ a narrative identity to be analyzed”, while “some people are more oriented toward narrative identity than are others”, measured by the ANIQ (p. 10). And the idea that lives “may readily assume a narrative form … would appear to be a cultural construction that resonates well with the sensibilities of the modern world” (p. 13).

The first half of the title is McAdams’s framework, supported by cited developmental findings. The second half rests, as a causal claim, on one longitudinal study the record holds only through this citation. The rest is correlational.

What this does not say

• It does not say the story is true. Narrative identity is “an invented construction”, not “a veridical testimony” (NOTE-470). The claim is that it is causally consequential, not accurate.
• It does not say everyone has one. McAdams’s own concessions (the ANIQ, the cultural-construction remark) make universality the account’s weakest point, and promote_when says how to test it.
• It does not say storytelling is an adaptation. The essay’s evolutionary framing is labelled speculative and is not part of this account.
• It does not say what makes agency over time self-governed. That is a different unity (see Bratman, below).

Connections

• Strawson, “Against Narrativity” (LIT-452, NOTE-383). Strawson denies the psychological Narrativity thesis in any non-trivial version, and says many normal people are Episodic: they do not experience the self they are as having been there in the further past (NOTE-383, C1, C5). He also denies the ethical thesis: Episodic lives can be good (C6). That rivals both halves. If the first half is true, Episodics either have a life story they do not experience as theirs, or lack the identity it constitutes. If the second is true, they should fare worse unless their story-less lives are offset otherwise. The two works already rival each other in the LIT scheme, and Strawson’s account, now stated in THEORY-684, rivals this one. Strawson’s evidence is testimony, and McAdams does not cite him; the ANIQ comparison in promote_when is where they would meet.
• Bratman’s self-governance over time (THEORY-076). Bratman grants that narrative unity “may apply to many cases” and holds that the “more basic” unity at work in diachronic self-governance is acting together with oneself. That is not a rival claim. The two accounts are about different unities in the record’s sense: this one about the unity a life has as a story, that one about what makes conduct over time governed by the agent. They would be rivals only if each claimed to be the basic unity of the same thing, and McAdams makes no claim about self-governance. Bratman’s remark is a claim about which unity self-governance needs, and both can be true. No rivals is declared.
• The RFT and ACT self (THEORY-044, THEORY-050, THEORY-051). RFT’s conceptualized self, the content of verbal relations about oneself, is the narrative self described from outside (THEORY-044), and McAdams’s life story is a developed version of that content. ACT treats domination by it as inflexibility (THEORY-050). This account treats constructing it as a developmental achievement whose content can help. The two agree if holding a story and being fused with it are different things. Adler’s finding that more agentic stories precede improvement is compatible with ACT only if the change is in what the story says and not in how tightly it is held. Neither source draws the distinction, and nothing in the record tests it.
• Metzinger (THEORY-064). Metzinger’s self is pre-reflective and present. He attributes the experience of an enduring self to “the invariance of bodily self-awareness and autobiographical memory” (NOTE-460, §3.5), which is where McAdams’s author begins. The two are accounts of different things, a subject and a life story, and do not compete.