The Story a Life Tells

Someone is asked, over coffee, how they came to be who they are. A thought begins to arrange things. First this happened, then that, and then it all made sense. KTT counts that arranging as thought, noticed or not, even when it comes out as a story told aloud. The psychologist Dan McAdams has argued since 1985 that such stories are part of what a person is. The sources read for this article are abstracts, a profile of his work and reference lists. They describe a theory with a lot of research behind it, and they did not test whether a story comes before the self.

The claim

In Power, Intimacy, and the Life Story (1985) and The Stories We Live By (1993), McAdams proposed that modern adults give their lives unity and purpose by building an internal, evolving story of the self, which he also called a personal myth. In a later formulation, he describes personality as three levels: traits, characteristic adaptations such as goals, and life stories. The third level is the one that tells the person who they are and why.

How the story gets made

In 2000, Tilmann Habermas and Susan Bluck described how the life story emerges in adolescence. The work needs a skill they call autobiographical reasoning: linking an event in the past to the self now, as in “because that happened, I became this.” They describe four kinds of coherence in a life story: in time, in the person’s biography, in cause and in theme.

Two shapes of a story

McAdams and colleagues looked at two plot shapes in life stories. In a redemption sequence, a bad scene turns into a good outcome. In a contamination sequence, a good scene turns into a bad one. A 2001 study examined how these sequences relate to psychosocial adaptation in midlife adults and students. Redemptive stories have also been studied as a cultural pattern in the United States, and this raises a question about how far the shape is American.

What is not known

Whether the story shapes the person, or the person’s life shapes the story, is not known. The sources read here describe patterns, not a direction.

Whether a redemptive story is better for a person, or only common in a certain culture, is open. The research that links plot shapes to adaptation is about correlation, not cause.

Whether people outside the societies studied tell their lives as one connected story at all is also open.