Self‐Defining Memories, Scripts, and the Life Story: Narrative Identity in Personality and Psychotherapy

An integrative model of narrative identity builds on a dual memory system that draws on episodic memory and a long-term self to generate autobiographical memories.Autobiographical memories related to critical goals in a lifetime period lead to life-story memories, which in turn become self-defining memories when linked to an individual’s enduring concerns. Self-defining memories that share repetitive emotion-outcome sequences yield narrative scripts, abstracted templates that filter cognitive-affective processing.The life story is the individual’s overarching narrative that provides unity and purpose over the life course. Healthy narrative identity combines memory specificity with adaptive meaning-making to achieve insight and well-being, as demonstrated through a literature review of personality and clinical research, as well as new findings from our own research program. A clinical case study drawing on this narrative identity model is also presented with implications for treatment and research. In 1986, the late Ted Sarbin declared that narrative might be considered the “root metaphor” of psychology (Sarbin, 1986). In selecting this phrase, he was drawing on Stephen Pepper’s concept of a root metaphor as a “point of origin for a world hypothesis” (http://grammar.about.com/od/rs/g/ rootmetaphorterm.htm). This idea, that the shaping of experience into a storied form might be a central way of understanding human psychology, has indeed taken root and flourished since Sarbin wrote these words. Researchers in cognitive science (Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Conway, Singer, & Tagini, 2004), developmental psychology (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McLean, 2008; McLean & Pasupathi, 2011), personality psychology (Bauer & McAdams, 2004; Lilgendahl & McAdams, 2011; McAdams, 1985, 1996), social psychology (Baumeister, Stillwell, & Heatherton, 2001; Langens & Schuler, 2005), and clinical psychology (Angus & Greenberg, 2011; Dimaggio & Semeraris, 2004; McLeod, 1997) have embraced the study of narrative. Because narrative units can extend from the brief account of a single episodic memory to the fully rendered account of an individual’s life story, the scope of potential investigation into narrative dimensions of human thought and interaction is rather daunting. However, within personality psychology, there have been efforts to rein in the study of narrative to focus on the topic of “narrative identity” (McAdams & Pals, 2006; McLean, 2008; Singer, 2004) and its role in providing individuals with an overall sense of unity and purpose in their lives. In the last decade, there have been great advances in defining the key components, processes, functions, and content dimensions of narrative identity. As this progress has accumulated, personality and clinical psychologists interested in psychological health have begun to discern what differentiates the development and maintenance of healthy narrative identity from more problematic and dysfunctional forms. The definition of key factors in healthy narrative identity translates into invaluable information for assessment and treatment of clients in psychotherapy.