Northwestern professor Dan McAdams developed the concept of narrative identity. A collection of his enterprising students pushed it in unexpected directions.
Call it an epiphany.
While completing his undergraduate studies in psychology and theater, Jonathan Adler read a paper penned by Northwestern University human development and social policy professor Dan McAdams detailing the psychological concept of narrative identity – the stories rattling around our minds shaping who we are and who we are becoming.
Adler, who had long been drawn to the power of stories to shape lives, was fascinated. He had never before considered using the tools of psychology to study stories. McAdams changed that – first as a scholarly stranger and later as a mentor for Adler, who earned MS and PhD degrees in psychology from Northwestern in 2005 and 2009, respectively.
“I was drawn to the idea that the way you narrate your life was key to your well-being,” Adler says.
Now a professor of psychology at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, Adler has emerged as a prominent voice studying narrative identity. His game-changing research tracking changes in narrative identity over the course of psychotherapy demonstrated improved mental health as patients imported more and more “agency,” namely control and self-efficacy, into their narrative accounts. Their stories changed first; then, their symptoms abated. Adler detailed as much during a recent episode of the popular Hidden Brain podcast hosted by journalist and author Shankar Vedantam.
But Adler is far from alone in being inspired by McAdams and his psychological concept. In fact, a number of McAdams’s former students have embraced the study of narrative identity and created their own energizing professional niche.
McAdams developed the concept of narrative identity in the 1980s, thrusting it into the scholarly consciousness with his debut book, Power, Intimacy, and the Life Story: Personological Inquiries into Identity.
Back then, McAdams explains, personality psychologists largely lived on the surface. They often studied basic traits and dispositional differences between people – extrovert or introvert, agreeable or confrontational – impacting their performance in everyday life. They approached identity in traditional ways – gender, ethnic, or racial identity, for example.
McAdams’s theory, however, called for thinking about identity as an evolving story in the mind, something akin to a Victorian novel with scenes and characters, turning points and themes. For McAdams, stories are arguably the most natural way people express themselves and an important psychological resource. Stories also provide human lives a sense of continuity, purpose, and meaning, helping to attach the past to an imagined future.
“We’re all walking around with these stories in our heads and they are more than just simple anecdotes that are fun to talk about,” says McAdams, the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology at Weinberg College and the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern. “When people start telling stories about their lives to a willing listener or an interested audience, they feel they’re being authentic, that they’re being heard, and that this is who they really are.”
Over the last three decades, McAdams, a prolific scholar with more than 300 publications to his name, has focused his own research on the narrative identities constructed by caring and productive midlife adults trying to make a difference in the world and generate a legacy, efforts he chronicled in his 2006 book The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By. He’s also linked the concept of narrative identity to personality, developmental, social, and cultural psychology, including it in psychobiographies of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden.
McAdams’s concept of narrative identity features prominently in a new series called The Well from the John Templeton Foundation and Big Think. He was also recently named the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s Constellation honoree for its annual convention in February, an award celebrating his legacy-building work in the field.
Beyond his own research, McAdams has promoted the idea of narrative identity in the classroom and at The Study of Lives Research Group he directs at Northwestern. Rather than charging students to think of individuals in psychological terms with diagnoses, traits, and other labels swirling about, he’s urged them to consider individuals in literary terms to stimulate understanding.
And at Northwestern, many young researchers have accepted McAdams’s charge – and taken their inquiry into diverse areas of study.
The McAdams ripple effect
One of McAdams’s first students to apply the narrative identity concept was Shadd Maruna PhD ’93, now an eminent criminologist based at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. Maruna has related the idea of narrative identity to the lives of reformed criminals, including how formerly incarcerated individuals transform their lives after release.
Adler initially directed ideas of narrative identity to psychotherapy, interested in seeing how a person’s narrative understanding of life events predicted improvement over the course of therapy. Over more recent years, he’s turned his focus to individuals with illness and disabilities, finding that people forced to grapple with the relationship between their identity and their body often provide helpful insights for navigating life.
“The way we tell our stories is related to our well-being above and beyond many other things like our demographics or dispositional personality traits,” Adler says, adding that there may be a connection between particular ways of narrating challenges and our biological stress response. “Changing our stories seems to precede changes in our well-being, not the other way around.”
Another former student, Hollen Reischer PhD ’22, examines the phenomenon of self-transcendence as it plays out in narrative identity, especially among people in late midlife. She has shown that self-transcendence – feelings of connectedness within the self and with phenomena greater than the self – increases in the narratives of many individuals around age 55 as they begin to earnestly reflect on their most important values, memories, and life lessons. This research has motivated Reischer to develop a narrative identity-based mental health intervention encouraging midlife and older adults to share those reflections with loved ones and communities as part of their individual legacies.
“Narrative identity methods help illuminate the complexity of lived experience,” says Reischer, now a visiting assistant professor at the University of Buffalo. “Narrative is a method that forces researchers to examine humanistic elements that are so often lost in big data methods.”
Henry Raffles Cowan PhD ’22 has extended narrative identity into the study of schizophrenia and other clinical conditions, while Ariana Turner PhD ’22 is applying the concept toward cross-cultural narratives, particularly looking at how people in Denmark, Israel, Japan, and the U.S. narrate suffering and negative events in their lives.
“There’s a particular power in sharing your story and having the opportunity to hear and honor another person’s story,” says Turner, now a post-doctoral researcher at Georgia Tech. “Stories are one of the most universal parts of being human and, every day, I get to see firsthand how stories can better humanity.”
McAdams’s former students heap praise on their mentor for driving their curiosity and shepherding their growth.
Turner, who deferred her graduate school applications one year for a shot to train under McAdams, called it “a dream” to work with the man who developed narrative identity and championed the concept.
“It’s really difficult to separate who I am now as a narrative scholar and what I learned from [McAdams],” Turner says. “He taught me how to be a better thinker, researcher, and writer, and it was an incredible opportunity to learn from the founder of this area I love so much.”
Reischer says McAdams integrates various sources of knowledge in tackling a research problem, which serves to both deepen his analysis and broaden its reach. Yet more, it’s motivated her own work.
“The approach really reflects Dan’s own flexibility and courage as a scientist – such a dynamic dance is crucial in the exploration of big ideas that matter,” Reischer says.
And Adler credits McAdams for consistently modeling a remarkable ability to think about both the individual and the broader culture at the same time. As a graduate student, he read early drafts of The Redemptive Self. He marveled at McAdams’s deft work and found inspiration propelling his own research career.
“I remember thinking that this was the way to study narratives – to look for the resonances between the richly specific stories of individual people and the broad storylines that captivate a whole society,” Adler says.
For McAdams, who says he felt like “a lone voice in the wilderness” early in his career, the accelerating emergence of narrative identity – sparked by the enterprising work of many former students – has been a gratifying turn. Narrative identity has become an important intellectual idea for understanding people and also injected itself into unexpected research areas, such as psychotherapy, disability studies, and psychopathology.
“I always thought the idea of narrative identity was cool, but it’s been extraordinarily fulfilling to see this next generation embracing narrative identity and spreading the good news,” McAdams says.