 5. Narrative Identity and the Life Story 123
explicitly imagined human beings as story -
tellers and human lives as stories to be told.
Instead, the first narrative  theories of per -
sonality emerged in the late 1970s and early 
1980s. Tomkins (1979) proposed a script 
theory  of personality that conceives of the 
developing person as akin to a playwright 
who organizes emotional life in terms of sa -
lient scenes and recurrent scripts. Integrat -
ing psychoanalytic trends with life-  course 
sociology, Cohler (1982) argued that human 
lives take on a narrative form, with devel -
opmental stages representing chapters in a 
self- defining narrative arc. In a similar vein, 
McAdams (1985, 1996) proposed a life-sto -
ry model of identity, contending that people 
living in modern societies begin, in late ado -
lescence and young adulthood, to construe 
their lives as dynamic stories that integrate 
the reconstructed past and imagined fu -
ture. These internalized and evolving nar -
ratives function as a psychological resource 
by providing adult life with some semblance 
of temporal unity, purpose, and meaning. 
Importantly, McAdams (1985) developed a 
life- narrative research agenda (built around 
a life-story interview) and delineated spe -
cific features of life stories that would be 
amenable to empirical scrutiny. These fea -
tures included an ideological setting  (a 
backdrop of fundamental belief and value 
for the story), specific scenes  (high points, 
low points, turning points, and self-  defining 
memories; see also Singer & Salovey, 1993), 
a generativity script  (an envisioned ending 
for the story through which the protagonist 
leaves something behind for future gen -
erations), and recurrent thematic lines  (or 
motivational themes) of agency (autonomy, 
power, and achievement) and communion 
(love, intimacy, and affiliation).
The emergence of narrative concep -
tions and methods in personality psychol -
ogy roughly coincided with what has been 
called the narrative turn in the humanities, 
the qualitative social sciences, and in Ameri -
can culture more generally. The 1980s and 
1990s witnessed a tremendous upsurge of 
interest among academic humanists in the 
nature of narrative, discourse, and commu -
nicative performance, as evidenced in the 
rise of social-  constructionist and postmod -
ernist conceptions in literary and cultural 
studies and the proliferation of personal diaries, memoirs, life writing, and the like. 
Whereas McAdams (1985) imagined life 
stories as internal autobiographical projects 
that have enough staying power to be ana -
lyzed for self-  defining themes, postmodern 
conceptions questioned the permanence, 
even the existence, of such grand projects 
and argued instead that people tell and enact 
as many different kinds of stories in social 
life as there are situations within which to 
tell and enact them (Gergen, 1991). Certain 
approaches that came out of the latter tra -
dition conceived of life stories as fleeting, 
evanescent texts, revealing little beyond 
the exigencies of a social moment. Others, 
however, took more seriously the idea that 
human lives are decisively shaped in the long 
term by broad cultural narratives embed -
ded in families, communities, institutions, 
social classes, and the power structures of 
society (Goodson, 2017). Bringing together 
homologous lines of scholarship in psychol -
ogy, sociology, political science, communi -
cation studies, education, and medicine in 
the 1990s, Josselson and Lieblich (1993) 
launched an important book series entitled 
The Narrative Study of Lives . In so doing, 
Josselson and Lieblich gave name to an in -
ternational movement aimed at pursuing 
and promoting systematic inquiry into life 
stories, life history, personal narratives, and 
psychological and social biography (see also 
McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich, 2006).
Within the field of personality psychol -
ogy, a growing number of researchers have 
focused on the specific concept of narrative 
identity (McAdams & McLean, 2013). De -
veloping out of McAdams’s (1985) original 
life-story model of identity, narrative identi -
ty refers to the particular stories people have 
in their minds about how they have come to 
be the particular people they are becoming. 
For any given person, a narrative identity in -
tegrates a person’s reconstruction of the past 
(“how I came to be”) and imagined projec -
tion of the future (“who I will become”) into 
a single narrative arc, providing life with 
some sense of unity, purpose, and temporal 
coherence. People are not born with narra -
tive identities, of course. Instead, they con -
struct them over time, with important devel -
opmental advances witnessed in adolescence 
and the emerging adulthood years. Through 
adulthood and even into old age, people con -