Competence, relatedness, and autonomy in life stories

Over the past two decades, self-determination theory (SDT) has offered empirical psychology a much-needed framework for understanding the organismic-humanistic perspective on personality. In the target article, Deci and Ryan (this issue) claim that three needs-competence, relatedness, and autonomy-are so fundamental that they may be viewed as innate organismic tendencies. Although we are not in the position to examine this nativistic proposition adequately, we feel we can offer a critique on how the three needs are indeed fundamental in another way. If competence, relatedness, and autonomy are basic psychological needs in everyday life, then they should play fundamental roles in how people interpret and make sense of their lives. Throughout time and across cultures, people have made sense of their lives in story form (Bruner, 1990; Polkinghome, 1988). The purpose of our commentary is to outline the relationship between SDT's three needs and the basic elements of life stories, in the spirit of a synthesis between the organismic and narrative studies of lives. Life stories are like other stories in that they involve a cast of characters (namely the self and others), important episodes (e.g., high points, low points, turning points), and an interplay of motivations, intentions, expectations, actions, reactions, and evaluations. Life stories are unique among stories in that they function to organize or make sense of one's own life, providing the person with a sense of unity and purpose in a complex world. Thus the construction and reconstruction of one's life story over time equates to the ongoing process of constructing one's identity (Giddens, 1991; Hermans & Kempen, 1993; McAdams, 1985, 1993; Singer & Salovey, 1993). A person's identity, like other stories, has dimensions of content and structure. Content refers to the thematic substance of the story (i.e., what the story is about), whereas structure refers to the formal organization of the story (i.e., how the substance of the story is integrated). In telling their life stories, people tend to portray what happens in their lives (i.e., the content) along two dimensions, which Bakan (1966) labeled agency and communion. In our commentary we outline the connections between the organismic needs for competence and relatedness and the life-story themes of agency and communion, respectively. Briefly, agentic themes are found in stories that emphasize the importance of achievement, mastery, and having an impact on one's environment-qualities that closely correspond to the need for competence. Communal themes are found in stories that emphasize the importance of intimacy, connections to others, and caring for others-qualities that closely correspond to the need for relatedness. We also submit that the structure or integration of life stories is closely aligned with the organismic need for autonomy. Autonomy involves the need to organize one's experiences and behaviors into an integrated sense of self (Deci & Ryan, this issue). Similarly, the effectiveness of a story's structure depends largely on the degree to which the story integrates the thematic qualities of one's actions, experiences, and characteristics. In all, we propose that the needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy help answer why life stories conform to the content themes of agency and communion and aim toward an integrated narrative structure.