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Imagination, Cognition and

Narrative Identity: Personality: Consciousness in

Theory, Research, and Clinical
Practice
What Is It? What Does 2018, Vol. 37(3) 359–372
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Dan P. McAdams

Abstract
In this commentary, I provide an historical perspective on the methodological and
conceptual issues that are raised by the papers in this volume, with a focus on the
idea of narrative identity as it relates to autobiographical memory. Referring back to
the emergence of the concept of narrative identity in the 1980s, I consider old and
new ideas regarding the form and function of narrative identity and methodological
challenges that arise in efforts to measure and code psychologically important fea-
tures of life-narrative accounts.

Keywords
narrative identity, personality, life story, autobiographical memory

This special issue of Imagination, Cognition, and Personality is devoted to the

topic of narrative methods for studying autobiographical memory in the fields of
personality and cognitive psychology. But the wide assortment of excellent
papers gathered here is as much about concepts and processes as it is about
the niceties of research methodology. The editors expected as much when they
emphasized, in their opening article, the extent to which methodological choices
reflect theoretical stances and assumptions (Grysman & Mansfield, this volume).
This is why researchers rarely, if ever, employ narrative methods to assess

Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:
Dan P. McAdams, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
Email: [email protected]
360 Imagination, Cognition and Personality 37(3)

individual differences in personality traits or in intelligence. The theoretical

assumptions we have about the nature of traits and intelligence suggest that
these concepts are not likely to manifest themselves, at least not in reliable
and readily detectable ways, in the stories people tell about their lives.
Instead, researchers typically use self-report ratings or behavioral observations
for traits, and objective tests of cognitive ability for intelligence. In these theo-
retical or methodological contexts, asking people to tell stories would be a waste
of time.
But storytelling methods seem to fit well the phenomenon of autobiographical
memory. If you want to know what people remember about particular events in
their lives (what happened, who was there, what they were thinking and feeling),
it makes eminent sense to ask them to tell the stories of the remembered event. In
this way, the concept of autobiographical memory is operationalized through
the research participants’ narrations of memories. The value of narrative meth-
ods would seem to rise even further in those cases where you want to know what
the memories mean for the people who remember them, especially if you are
interested in how people generate meanings spontaneously, in the very act of
narrating (e.g., Alea, this volume).
Once a narrative method allows personal meanings to come to the fore, the
concept of narrative identity (McAdams & McLean, 2013) steps into the theore-
tical arena, as it did in nearly all of the papers in this volume. As it turns out,
narrative identity is the concept around which the different narrative methods
described in these papers revolve. Or at least that is how I read them. This gives
me an opportunity, then, to reflect on the papers as they relate to the concept of
narrative identity, asking: What is narrative identity? What does it do? How do
you measure it? I will address each of the three questions, in turn, from an
historical perspective.

Form: What Is Narrative Identity?

Before the 1980s, psychologists did not typically associate the idea of ‘‘identity’’
with the idea of ‘‘narrative.’’ For me, the realization that these two concepts
might be linked arose shortly after I taught a graduate seminar, in the summer of
1982, on ‘‘self and identity.’’ The reading list included William James, George
Herbert Mead, Jane Loevinger, Heinz Kohut, Robert Kegan, and a large
number of authors in developmental and social psychology. And, of course,
Erik Erikson. The students and I spent a great deal of time puzzling over
passages in which Erikson explicitly described the concept of identity. Identity
is a ‘‘configuration,’’ Erikson (1959, p. 113) wrote, an ‘‘integration’’ of
‘‘childhood identifications,’’ ‘‘the vicissitudes of the libido,’’ ‘‘aptitudes devel-
oped out of endowment,’’ and ‘‘opportunities offered in social roles,’’ all work-
ing together, as it were, to confer upon a life a sense of ‘‘inner sameness and
continuity’’ (Erikson, 1963, p. 261). An identity, moreover, should usher in
McAdams 361

adulthood, a new stage in life wherein a person now understands ‘‘life in con-
tinuous perspective, both in retrospect and prospect’’ (Erikson, 1958, p. 111). As
such, the person who ‘‘has’’ identity is now ‘‘able to selectively reconstruct his
past in such a way that, step for step, it seems to have planned him, or better, he
seems to have planned it’’ (Erikson, 1958, p. 112).
Reading passages like these, I asked the students this: ‘‘If you could see an
identity, what would it look like?’’ What form would it take? We entertained a
number of possibilities. In an influential paper, Epstein (1973) had proposed that
‘‘the self-concept’’ is a ‘‘theory.’’ If you could see an identity, would it look like a
theory? Complete with axioms, hypotheses, and so on? Probably not, we
thought. People are not that systematic, when it comes to selfhood. Maybe it
would look like a circus? Three rings of activity, loosely orchestrated by a ring-
master. Maybe it would look (and sometimes sound) like a symphony orchestra?
Perhaps geological images were more suitable, suggesting literal and historical
depth. As you dig deeper, you might unearth buried (and psychologically older)
layers of identity.
We never hit upon an image that worked. But a few months later, I began
playing around with the idea that identity, if you could see it, would look like a
story. After all, a story potentially integrates different psychological elements,
brings a certain kind of narrative order and logic to the chaos of experienced life,
and, most importantly, seems to capture the temporal aspects of Erikson’s con-
cept. When you ask people how they came to be who they are, and when you ask
them to talk about the future, they typically tell stories. Imagine identity as an
internalized and evolving life story, providing, in Erikson’s evocative words, both
a ‘‘retrospective’’ and ‘‘prospective’’ sense of a life in time, such that ‘‘step for
step, it [the story] seems to have planned him [the person as protagonist] or better,
he [the person as narrator] seems to have planned [written] it [the story].’’
In McAdams (1985), I articulated a model of identity as a life story, complete
with setting, scenes, characters, plots, and themes. I imagined it as a big story, an
integrative autobiographical project, a personal myth (McAdams, 1990) that
situates a person in the world, integrates a life in time, and provides meaning
and purpose. If you could literally see it (and read it), it would look like a bound
novel. You would see or read the chapters, and you would likely focus in on
particularly important, self-defining scenes (Singer & Salovey, 1993), episodes
that jump out for their psychological import, like high points, low points, and
turning points.
The concept of identity as a life story—what we now call narrative identi-
ty—has evolved considerably over the past three decades. Researchers and the-
orists today imagine narrative identity as something rather more evanescent
than what was originally set forth in McAdams (1985), something more varie-
gated and dynamic, more culturally contoured, and more situated in, and even
constitutive of, ongoing interpersonal relationships and conversational perfor-
mances (Freeman, 2011; Grysman & Mansfield, this volume; Hammack, 2008;
362 Imagination, Cognition and Personality 37(3)

McAdams, 2013; McLean, Pasupathi, & Pals, 2007; McLean & Syed, 2015).
Whereas some contemporary scholars approach narrative identity as a big
story that integrates many different chapters, scenes, and characters, others
focus on small stories as they appear in circumscribed domains and contexts.
In the preceding papers, Alea (this volume) seems to have the big picture in
mind as she codes specific scenes within the life story—high points, low points,
and turning points—for the affective themes of redemption and contamination.
Similar strategies appear in place for Banks and Salmon (this volume), who
explore relations between high points, low points, and turning points, on the
one hand, and symptoms of depression and anxiety on the other; Holm and
Thomsen (this volume), who examine how self-event connections in narrative
contribute to overall self-unity; and Liao, Bluck, and Westerhof (this volume),
who consider how self-defining memories may promote overall positivity in
personality. Studies like these often aggregate scores across scenes to arrive at
broad, summary indices of a person’s overall style or propensity in narrating a
life (e.g., McAdams & Guo, 2015).
Other approaches, however, examine more specialized stories, like narrative
accounts of harm-doing (Pasupathi, Wainryb, Bourne, & Posada, this volume)
or intercultural encounters (Kober, Weihofen, & Rennstich, this volume). The
dynamics in these smaller stories are psychologically revealing for their own
sake, even if they do not reflect on or foreshadow broader narrative tendencies
across other life-narrative scenes. These kinds of studies dig deeper into a specific
domain in narrative identity. They suggest that people tell different kinds of
stories about different things, and they aim to show that these differences
make a big difference.
In his Narrative Identity Structure Model (NISM), Dunlop (this volume)
aims to discern a form for narrative identity that incorporates both the big
and the little stories. The basic idea of NISM is simple, but the implications
are substantial. Dunlop proposes that highly contextualized role-based stories
rest below and contribute to a broader narrative about who I am (and how I
came to be) more generally. My stories of myself as a father, then, sit next to my
stories of myself as a professor, and both sets are subordinate to and feed into
the higher level story of Me. NISM is hierarchical, like other models of the self
that are popular in social psychology (e.g., McConnell, 2011) and certain trait
models in personality psychology (e.g., McCrae & Costa, 2008). This means that
smaller stories arrange themselves beneath and link upward to bigger stories,
which in turn may link up with even bigger and more encompassing stories.
NISM suggests a tightly organized form, with supersets subsuming sets subsum-
ing subsets, all the way down the line.
In making conceptual room for big and small stories, NISM represents a step
forward in theorizing about narrative identity. But as a form of friendly amend-
ment, let me express mild skepticism about the tidiness of this model. As with
Epstein’s (1973) conception of the self-concept as a theory, I wonder if narrative
McAdams 363

identity can be so neatly arranged. I agree that small, role-based stories must
occupy key positions in the broader narrative scheme for identity. But rather
than comprising a strict hierarchy, I propose that the form might more closely
resemble an anthology of related stories, or what appears in literature as the
single-authored short-story collection.
A good example of what I have in mind is Strout’s (2008) collection entitled
Olive Kitteridge, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. All of the stories in Strout’s
collection are set in a small town in Maine. The central character in many,
though not all, of the stories is a middle-aged woman named Olive Kitteridge,
whom we follow from roughly her 50s through her 70s, with occasional flash-
backs to earlier years. Many other characters play major roles as well, including
Olive’s husband, her son, her son’s wives, her husband’s assistants at the drug
store where he works, and a number of other people living in the small town.
The individual stories in this collection are not like chapters; they do not add up
to a novel. Each has its own plot line, but the plot lines intertwine in some cases,
and many (though not all) reflect common themes. Among the most striking
themes are intergenerational misunderstanding and ambivalence (in even the
most generative settings), the unquenchable longing for quotidian social contact,
and the remarkable power of sensual desire, even among the elderly. The tone is
bittersweet but hopeful.
There is a big narrative in Olive Kitteridge, running through and amidst the
smaller individual stories that comprise the volume. But the literary form is more
organic and associative than hierarchical. The stories overlap in somewhat
unpredictable ways, and a few of them seem to go off in their own peculiar
directions. What holds the small stories together is the authorial voice of
Strout, which itself is reflected in the overall tone of the book, the recurrent
themes I enumerated above, and the fact that nearly all of the stories relate, in
one way or another, to Olive Kitteridge as she develops over time. Maybe this is
what narrative identity looks like.

Function: What Does Narrative Identity Do?

Psychology’s turn toward narrative in the 1980s was a logical extension of its
gradual emancipation from the behaviorist grip. It may have been inevitable that
once empirical psychologists defied the strictures of behaviorism to peer inside
the black box of the human mind, as they began to do in the late 1950s and
1960s, they would eventually happen upon the idea of story. After all, human
beings the world over love to tell and hear stories, as Bruner (1986) and Sarbin
(1986) both observed. Human beings routinely adopt a narrative mode of
thought and expression, Bruner wrote, when it comes to explaining why
people do what they do. He distinguished the narrative mode from the paradig-
matic mode of thought, which employs logic, evidence, and argument to explain
instead how the (physicochemical) world works. Sarbin went so far as to anoint
364 Imagination, Cognition and Personality 37(3)

narrative as the new root metaphor for psychological science. Human beings are
storytellers by nature, Sarbin argued. Human conduct seems to obey narrative
rules. People think about their own lives, and the lives of others, in narrative
terms, as stories unfolding over time (Polkinghorne, 1988).
Outside of psychology proper, social scientists and humanists of many dif-
ferent persuasions became enamored with narrative in the 1980s and 1990s. A
central question running across many disciplines during this time concerned the
function of narrative: What do stories do? First and foremost, they entertain us,
some scholars argued (Brewer & Lichtenstein, 1982). Stories engage human
emotions, and when they do not, they fail. What is the worst thing you can
say about a story? That it is boring. From the parables of Jesus to Dickens,
stories also provide instruction on virtue and morality, on how to live a good life
(Coles, 1989). Throughout human evolution, even before language when people
enacted narrative in gesture and dance, stories have functioned to simulate social
experience (Mar & Oatley, 2008). When we read a good story or watch a good
movie today, we observe social interactions up close. We witness the clash of
human intentions and the timeless social conflicts and motivational dilemmas
that characterize so well what human life has always been about. It is
probably no exaggeration, then, to claim that stories teach us how to be human
(McAdams, 2015).
Narrative identity is a special kind of story—a story about how I came to be
the person I am becoming. With this special status comes the special function, a
function that Erikson (1963) assigned to identity itself. It is the function of
integration. Narrative identity brings things together, integrating elements of
the self in both a synchronic and a diachronic sense (McAdams, 1985).
Synchronically, narrative identity integrates different social roles (Dunlop, this
volume), values (Pasupathi et al., this volume; Wang, Song, & Koh, this
volume), attitudes, and performance demands in the variegated here-and-now
of life. A person’s story, thus, explains how he or she continues to affirm a sense
of ‘‘inner sameness and continuity’’ (Erikson, 1963, p. 251) across different
situational and role contexts. The life story also integrates life in a diachronic
sense, that is, over time, ideally showing how the self of yesterday has become
the self of today, the very same self that hopes or expects to become a certain
kind of (different but still similar) self in the future. Concerns about both syn-
chronic and diachronic integration—self-unity in space and time—are salient in
Holm and Thomsen’s (this volume) study of self-event connections, self-concept
clarity, and dissociation.
Since the 1980s, psychologists have identified a number of other potential
functions of narrative identity. As the most notable example, Bluck and Alea
(2011) have enumerated (and developed a measure to assess) three primary
functions of autobiographical memory in everyday life. People may call upon
stories about their personal past to serve social, directive, or self functions.
Telling autobiographical memories may promote social relationships; people
McAdams 365

enjoy sharing stories about their lives with each other. Autobiographical mem-
ories may also provide guidance (directives) for life. When confronting a difficult
decision, for example, a person may call up memories of similar events in his or
her life, consulting them for advice, mining them for insights that may prove
helpful in the current situation. What Bluck and Alea put into the domain of
functions serving the self includes promoting self-continuity (diachronic integra-
tion) for sure, but it also includes the ways in which memories may be called
upon to boost morale or sustain positive self-regard. In this light, Liao et al. (this
volume) found that positive meaning making in self-defining memories predicted
enhanced self-esteem one year later.
In adopting a developmental framework for understanding narrative identity,
Fivush, Booker, and Graci (this volume) bring together issues regarding both
function and form. They point out that life story construction is constrained by
the exigencies of the developmental period during which a narrator aims to
make sense of the past. The same event, then, can mean very different things
for the same person at two different points in time (Josselson, 2009). At an early
age, for example, the narrator may lack certain skills in autobiographical reason-
ing that would otherwise enable him or her to discern a significant theme or
insight from the event, or connect the event to similar others (Habermas &
Bluck, 2000). When those skills come online later in development, the person
may now understand that same event in very different terms. In this regard,
McLean, Breen, and Fournier (2010) have shown that unlike older individuals
and unlike females, early-adolescent boys who narrate negative experiences in
highly elaborative ways do not enjoy higher levels of psychological well-being.
Young adolescent boys may lack the autobiographical skills to process aversive
life events in a psychologically productive manner.
Whereas developmental level may constrain meaning making in narrative
identity, meaning making efforts may also catalyze development. Fivush et al.
(this volume) describe the process of making narrative sense out of life as a
mechanism for self-development. The performance of narrative identity may
function, therefore, to refine meanings and thereby help the narrator attain a
better understanding of self and reach a higher developmental plateau.
Elaborating upon the distinction between narrative as window and narrative as
process, introduced by Grysman and Mansfield (this volume), Fivush et al. (this
volume) contend that narrating life experiences is indeed a window into the
current developmental dynamics and parameters that prevail in a given life,
but also a process that may promote development itself.

Method: How Do You Measure Narrative Identity?

The research program for narrative identity first laid out in McAdams (1985)
drew heavily from the tradition of assessing individual differences in social
motives through the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT; Murray, 1938).
366 Imagination, Cognition and Personality 37(3)

Beginning in the late 1940s, McClelland et al. developed standardized protocols

for administering the TAT in research settings and for scoring TAT responses
for variation on achievement (McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, & Lowell, 1953),
affiliation (Atkinson, Heyns, & Veroff, 1954), and power (Winter, 1973) motiva-
tion. For each picture cue in the TAT, the participant is given 5 minutes to tell or
write an imaginative story that describes what is happening in the picture now,
what led up to this situation, what will happen in the future, and what the
characters in the story are thinking and feeling. Then, the researchers conduct
content analysis to detect the presence or absence in each story of a series of
objectively defined themes associated with whatever motive is being studied.
In the first version of a life story interview, McAdams (1985) repurposed the
standard TAT instructions to apply to the narratives respondents might provide
of key autobiographical memories, such as life-story high points, low points, and
turning points as well as other prompts. He developed content analysis systems
for assessing variations on themes of agency and communion, among other
things, following strategies validated in the TAT tradition. He also drew heavily
on the concept of ego development (Loevinger, 1976) and the measurement logic
employed for assessing the complexity of sentence-completion responses for
individual differences in ego development. Whereas that TAT tradition captured
the kind of content themes that might run through life narrative accounts, stu-
dies of ego development provided insight regarding structure, as in how struc-
turally complex and coherent a narrative might be. McAdams reported a series
of preliminary studies showing that (a) high scores on TAT power motivation
were associated with agentic themes and images in life stories; (b) high scores on
TAT intimacy motivation were associated with communal themes and images in
life stories; and (c) high scores on ego development were associated with struc-
turally more complex life stories, which tended to include a wider range of plot
lines and what we would now label as more sophisticated forms of autobiogra-
phical reasoning.
Over the past three decades, empirical research on narrative identity has often
adopted the convention of focusing on a handful of key scenes or events in a
person’s life, as if they were individual TAT stories. Moreover, many researchers
have followed McClelland’s lead, and that of McAdams (1985), in scoring open-
ended narrative responses for objectively defined constructs, such as agency and
communion themes, redemption and contamination, elaborative processing,
meaning making, and coherence, among others (Adler, Lodi-Smith, Philippe,
& Houle, 2016). The emphasis throughout has been on giving research partici-
pants freedom to craft their own narrative responses, reading the stories in full,
and assigning scores or codes to the stories based on considerations of content
and structure.
Holm and Thomsen (this volume) offer an alternative approach. They ask:
Why not simply have respondents rate their own narrative accounts? Rather
than read and code narrative responses, Holm and Thomsen (this volume)
McAdams 367

obtained self-ratings from respondents on what they describe as positive or

negative self-change and self-stability. The self-report procedure saves time
and energy for the researchers, and it may also have the advantage of tying
the resultant scores themselves directly to the respondent’s own perspective on
the particular memory being rated. After all, the memory belongs to the respon-
dent, not an objective coder, so the respondent may be in a better position than
an outside reader to understand what the remembered event was all about, and
what it means for the respondent today.
Panattoni and McLean (this volume) approach the same issue from a differ-
ent angle. They note that when respondents rate their own narrative accounts on
a given dimension those ratings may not correlate highly with the scores
obtained from objective coders on the very same dimension. These ‘‘puzzling
mismatches’’ may effectively indicate lack of interrater reliability (if we think of
the respondent as simply another rater), or they may suggest that self-ratings
and objective codes are getting at two different things. Panattoni and McLean
settle for the second interpretation, suggesting that the two different methods tap
into two different features of narrative identity. Self-ratings may signal the
respondent’s current conscious interpretation of the remembered event, whereas
coding may tap into a mix of both consciously and unconsciously motivated
aspects of narrative identity. Panattoni and McLean frame the distinction as
reflecting two different conversational contexts.
The distinction between self-report and narrative coding is reminiscent of a
parallel phenomenon in the literature on assessing social motives through the
TAT. Since the 1960s, it has been known that self-report scores on scales
designed to measure constructs like achievement motivation do not correlate
highly with scores obtained from coding TAT stories on purportedly the very
same constructs. Which of the two measures—self-report or the TAT—is the
better measure of individual differences in achievement motivation? Like
Panattoni and McLean (this volume), McClelland (1980) has long argued that
the two methods tap into different things. Self-report scales measure conscious
values or traits, he contended, whereas the TAT taps into less-than-conscious, or
implicit, motivational trends in spontaneous narrative thought. In recent years,
research on motive congruence has examined what happens for any given respon-
dent when the two different scores are simpatico with each other (say, when a
person scores high on both self-report and TAT achievement motivation) versus
when they are not (Hagemeyer, Neberich, Asendorpf, & Neyer, 2013). The
literature tends to suggest that congruence between implicit (narrative TAT-
based) and explicit (self-report questionnaire) motives indicates an especially
strong orientation in the given motivational direction and, as a result, higher
levels of personality integration (Brunstein, 2008).
It is too soon to know if the methodological lessons learned in the TAT
tradition are directly relevant to the issue of mismatches between self-ratings
and third-person codes of life-narrative accounts. Following Panattoni and
368 Imagination, Cognition and Personality 37(3)

McLean (this volume), I agree that the two different methods tap into two
different aspects of self-storytelling. But I would frame the distinction in a
slightly different way. In the case of self-ratings, what the respondent is judging
is his or her own memory as it is currently recalled and processed. In the case of
third-person coding, by contrast, what is being assessed is the manifest narrative
itself. The coder does not have access to all of the details, associations, and
idiosyncratic meanings that the narrator has at his or her own disposal when
remembering the event and telling it (or writing it down). Instead, the coder
simply has the text. This would seem to give the narrator a certain advantage in
being able to tap into the exigencies of the memory itself, including features that
are not explicitly told or written down in the session. Therefore, if I (the narra-
tor) rate how much emotional positivity prevailed in my recollection of the high
school prom, I am rating what I remember not what I wrote down when asked
to remember. I am not limited by the story I wrote or told. The coder is limited
to the story. But perhaps this gives the coder a certain kind of advantage, too,
though a different one. The third-person coder has no choice but to focus on the
story itself. And might not the story itself—as written or told in the research
moment—be a more representative expression of narrative identity itself? After
all, narrative identity is not memory; it is the story told about memory.
In any case, the intriguing questions raised by Holm and Thomsen (this
volume) and Panattoni and McLean (this volume), along with all of the other
excellent papers compiled into this collection, show how far research and theory
on narrative identity have traveled since the 1980s, and they signal important
methodological and conceptual challenges that lie ahead. The papers also exem-
plify the creative synergies that occur when researchers from different traditions
come together at the nexus of autobiographical memory, identity, and
personality.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article: Preparation of this article was supported by grant
to the author from the Foley Family Foundation, which supports research on adult
personality development through the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at
Northwestern University.

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Author Biography
Dan P. McAdams is the Henry Wade Rogers professor of Psychology and a
professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern
University, in Evanston, IL, USA. He is the author most recently of The Art
and Science of Personality Development (Guilford Press, 2015).