The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self
No self-help treatise about exorcising fatalistic visions of one's life, this frequently wooden but intermittently arresting book proposes that "each of us comes to know who he or she is by creating a heroic story of the self." McAdams, a Chicago psychologist, argues against archetypal myths, although he makes tantalizing if fleeting references to fairy tales and other properties of mass culture. A little heavy on developmental theory, the work hypothesizes how people begin to "gather material" for their "self-defining stories" in infancy and early childhood. In several case studies McAdams demonstrates the role of myth, while one of the stronger sections explains how to write a narrative to uncover personal myths, offering a list of questions for that purpose. Elsewhere, McAdams discusses "imagoes"--defined as idealized concepts of self, the characters in personal narratives--and explores how such historical events as the Kennedy assassination are assimilated into one's own saga.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.