Rereading Personal Narrative and Life Course
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New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development Number 145 Fall 2014 Rereading Personal Narrative and Brian Schiff Life Course Editor New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development Lene Arnett Jensen Reed W. Larson Editors-in-Chief William Damon Founding Editor Rereading Personal Narrative and Life Course Brian Schiff Editor Number 145 • Fall 2014 Jossey-Bass San Francisco REREADING PERSONAL NARRATIVE AND LIFE COURSE Brian Schiff (ed.) New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, no. 145 Lene Arnett Jensen, Reed W. Larson, Editors-in-Chief © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., A Wiley Company. All rights reserved. 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COVER PHOTOGRAPHS: ©iStock.com/paulaphoto (top); ©iStock.com/vm (middle); ©iStock.com/ericsphotography (bottom) EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE should be e-mailed to the editors-in-chief: Lene Arnett Jensen ([email protected]) and Reed W. Larson (larsonr@ illinois.edu). Jossey-Bass Web address: www.josseybass.com CONTENTS 1. Introduction: Development’s Story in Time and Place 1 Brian Schiff This introductory chapter outlines the four major theses of Bertram J. Cohler’s groundbreaking chapter Personal Narrative and Life Course and argues for the necessity of a narrative perspective for understanding human development. 2. Narrative Making and Remaking in the Early Years: Prelude 15 to the Personal Narrative Peggy J. Miller, Eva Chian-Hui Chen, Megan Olivarez Ethnographic studies of young children in the family context reveal that the process of narrative interpretation is vigorously underway much earlier in life than Cohler realized, constituting a surprising de- gree of continuity between early meaning making and the personal narrative. 3. Contextualizing the Self: The Emergence of a Biographical 29 Understanding in Adolescence Tilmann Habermas, Nes¸e Hatiboglu˘ Inspired by Cohler’s seminal theory, the authors argue that adolescents learn to create coherence in their life story by contextualizing their life in family and social history and by forming a story of personal origins and future prospects. 4. Narrative and the Social Construction of Adulthood 43 Phillip L. Hammack, Erin Toolis The authors highlight the link between Cohler’s original essay and in- terpretive approaches to human development, cultural-historical activ- ity theory, and a social constructionist perspective on emerging adult- hood that emphasizes identity and memory as coconstructed through storytelling and the construction of an individual life story. 5. The Life Narrative at Midlife 57 Dan P.McAdams Over the past three decades, psychologists have demonstrated the in- tegrative power of personal narrative in the lives of midlife adults, demonstrating how life stories function as adaptive personal resources and windows into the influence of culture on human lives. 6. Narrating Your Life After 65 (or: To Tell or Not to Tell, That 71 Is the Question) Amia Lieblich This chapter examines the long-held belief that narrating one’s life story contributes to the well-being of the elderly. 7. “Personal Narrative and Life Course” Revisited: Bert 85 Cohler’s Legacy for Developmental Psychology Mark Freeman By addressing ordered transformations in the personal narrative throughout the life course, Bertram Cohler’s seminal 1982 essay pro- vides a valuable vehicle for rethinking the nature of the developmental process itself. INDEX 97 Schiff, B. (2014). Introduction: Development’s story in time and place. In B. Schiff (Ed.), Rereading Personal Narrative and Life Course. New Directions for Child and Adolescent De- velopment, 145, 1–13. 1 Introduction: Development’s Story in Time and Place Brian Schiff Abstract In this introductory chapter, I place Bertram J. Cohler’s (1982) seminal essay Personal Narrative and Life Course in the context of the history of narrative psychology and developmental theory. I describe four theses from Personal Nar- rative and Life Course, which impacted developmental theory and research: (a) the self is a narrative project, (b) developmental periods have a distinct narra- tive character, (c) narratives are always told in (personal and historical) time, and (d) persons strive for coherence. I briefly describe the chapters to follow. However, my main goal is to argue for the implications of narrative for devel- opmental science. Following Cohler, I argue that narrative has a central role to play in understanding human lives and can provide substantial benefit to devel- opmental theory and research. A narrative perspective allows for a complex and nuanced description of developmental phenomena that accounts for the subjec- tive and unpredictable nature of human lives. The narrative interpretation of experience is a primary human activity that alters the meaning of experience and potentially sets development on a new course, rendering the prediction of developmental outcomes a difficult venture. The narrative perspective provides detailed insights into how development unfolds, how persons actually interpret and reinterpret life in time and place, and can help psychologists to engage fun- damental questions about the meaning of experience. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NEW DIRECTIONS FOR CHILD AND ADOLESCENT DEVELOPMENT, no. 145, Fall 2014 © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). • DOI: 10.1002/cad.20063 1 2REREADING PERSONAL NARRATIVE AND LIFE COURSE Rather than viewing personality development either in terms of continuing stability over time or in terms of a number of well-ordered phases or stages, lives seem to be characterized by often abrupt transformations determined both by expected and eruptive life events and by intrinsic, but not neces- sarily continuous, developmental factors, including biological aging. These events taking place across the life course are later remembered as elements of a narrative which provides a coherent account of this often disjunctive life course. The form of this narrative is based upon a socially shared belief in Western culture that all narratives, including history, literature, and biogra- phies, must have a beginning, a middle, and an end related to each other in a meaningful manner. (Cohler, 1982, pp. 227–228) his volume is a reflection on life course developmental theory. In particular, the volume argues for the centrality of narrative interpre- T tation for human development. As a point of departure, we begin from Bertram Joseph Cohler’s (1938–2012) seminal contribution to our un- derstanding of developmental psychology.During his prolific career, Cohler published over 200 papers and book chapters. But, Cohler’s (1982) chap- ter Personal Narrative and Life Course is clearly one of the most influential. The chapter is one of the first published manuscripts in psychology onthe process of storytelling for establishing selfhood and identity and one of the first essays on what would later become narrative psychology. In fact,the chapter was published before Theodore Sarbin (1986) coined the term “nar- rative psychology” or Jerome Bruner (1990) heralded the “narrative turn in psychology.” Although Personal Narrative and Life Course is difficult to locate (PsycInfo doesn’t even index the chapter),