Narrative Identity is Existentialist
Northwestern University. September 22, 2022.
I often develop close relationships with the authors of books I admire, even though they are usually long dead. These relationships are both intellectual and emotional. I feel I come to know some authors in a deep and abiding way, and I wish they could also know me. There is probably a DSM category for my condition, but it has served me well, I think, when it comes to existentialism. True confession: I do not typically think of myself as an existential psychologist. But maybe I should, because my own work and my very identity have been profoundly shaped by my close relationships with four great thinkers in the existentialist tradition. I’d like to share the story of what I believe their influence has been, and continues to be, going back to my freshman year in college, and how it’s influenced our research on narrative identity.
Fear, Trembling, and the True Novel
It was the fall of 1972, when I walked past the university chapel and through the doors of Mueller Hall to attend my first seminar in Christ College, which is what Valparaiso University calls its small humanities honors program, focused on the close reading of great texts. It was in Christ College where I first encountered Freud and Skinner (Walden Two, 1948) and read so many wonderful, and sometimes baffling, contributions in philosophy, poetry, and literature.
Fear and trembling
In my freshman year, however, the book that stood out most vividly for its sheer weirdness and its emotional power was Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843/2003). Kierkegaard’s text is the story from Genesis wherein God commands Abraham to kill his only son. In a lyrical language that evokes mystery and dread, Kierkegaard tries to imagine what is going through Abraham’s mind and heart as he walks with Isaac through the land of Moriah, where he is resolved to sacrifice his son. How can this be happening?
Clockwise from top left: Sketch of Soren Kierkegaard by Niels Kierkegaard (1840); The Søren Kierkegaard Statue in the Royal Library Garden in Copenhagen; The sacrifice of Isaac, painted by Caravaggio (1603), on display in the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence.
When Abraham and Sarah are long past the parenting stage of life, God finally delivers on his promise to provide an heir, whose descendants, God insists, will bring forth a great nation. But now, inexplicably, God goes back on the covenant by demanding the unthinkable. And Abraham is crazy enough to obey. What is it like to be Abraham on this journey, as he tries haplessly to answer Isaac’s innocent questions, and as he raises his knife to slaughter his beloved and beautiful son? And yeah, okay, the Angel of the Lord does intervene at the last second, just before the knife meets flesh. Lucky Isaac! But how can Abraham go on from there? How can he live a good life? What is he going to tell his son? And Sarah? Try keeping this kind of thing secret from the boy’s mother!
Back in college I found troubling Kierkegaard’s take-home argument that the “man of faith” must suspend all reason and bracket an ethical perspective on life in the presence of the absurd—must be ready to kill his son but still intuit, at some level, that this will work out fine in the end. That solution has never made full psychological sense to me.
But what impacted me more strongly and more positively was Kierkegaard’s evocation of an existentialist approach to thinking about life, long before I knew that Kierkegaard is generally viewed to be the father of existentialism. And as much as anything else I read freshman year, Kierkegaard turned me in the direction of psychology. I took from his writing existential precepts like these:
The emphasis on the phenomenology of conscious experience;
The role of choice in determining the meaning of one’s existence;
The idea that you become a new being with each choice you make; and
How the transformative nature of dynamic everyday existence may override a person’s inner essence.
Identity is a story.
Flash forward ten years, and I am now an assistant professor at Loyola University of Chicago, teaching a graduate seminar on “the self.” The students and I devote a great deal of time to the writings of Erik Erikson, and we puzzle over the meaning of Erikson’s concept of identity. Erikson wrote that an identity is something that a person constructs in late adolescence and young adulthood, as Martin Luther did in Erikson’s (1958) famous case study.
An identity gives your life a sense of sameness and continuity, Erikson said. It integrates your past, present, and future. It situates you in an adult niche. And on and on. Okay, but what is it?! If you could see an identity, what would it look like? The students and I entertained many different answers to these questions, but nothing seemed quite right to us.
Dan McAdams delivers a talk about his research on narrative identity.
A few months after the class ended, I began to consider this idea: Identity is a story. If you could see an identity, it would look like a self-constructed personal myth in the mind of a person, complete with settings, scenes, characters, plots, and themes. In late adolescence, we become storytellers of the self. As adults, we are all walking around with stories in our heads, which reconstruct the past and imagine the future in such a way as to provide our lives with the sense of sameness and continuity that Erikson insisted identity gives you.
In my first book, I described a life story model of identity, and I laid out a research agenda for studying individual differences in life stories (McAdams, 1985). Today, we speak of the concept I began to articulate back then as narrative identity (McAdams & McLean, 2013).
The self as the “true novel”
The concept of narrative identity owes much to my idiosyncratic interpretation of several different authors I was reading in the early 1980s, and very important among them was the great existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1965). In some of his writings, Sartre imagined the self as akin to what he called a true novel (Charme, 1984), which is a retrospective story that creates order out of the chaos of personal experience. Because traditional myths no longer provide meaning for modern adults, Sartre suggested, many people create their own myths about themselves to experience meaning. Ideally a person’s own true novel should reflect a central truth or dilemma about their own lives and about the world they live in.
As I read it, Sartre may be hinting at something like narrative identity. He was telling me that my ideas regarding identity as a life story might indeed be right. Sartre’s idea that a true novel contains a central truth, moreover, reflected in the last question my students and I ask in the life story interviews we have been conducting for over 30 years: Looking back over what you have said in this interview, do you discern a central theme or message?
Generativity and the Redemptive Self
The great pivot in my own professional life story was when I shifted from being a more-or-less conventional personality psychologist, trained as I was at Harvard under David McClelland, to focusing my research attention on life stories. But whose life stories should I study? By the time I moved to Northwestern University in 1989, I had decided to focus my research attention on the life stories of highly generative adults.
Clockwise from top left: Erick Erickson; Erikson’s Childhood and Society (1963); Ernest Becker; Becker’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Denial of Death (1973).
Erikson (1963) described generativity as an adult’s concern for and commitment to promoting the well-being of future generations. In their midlife years, highly generative adults consistently manifest the virtue of care, Erikson said. I consider generativity to be the worthiest psychosocial goal of adult life.
I also know that generativity is extraordinarily hard to do. Because of the daunting challenges generativity poses, a person would need an especially compelling and efficacious life story to support their generative efforts. What kinds of life stories (narrative identities) do highly generative adults construct? And how do those stories help to support a generative life?
Identity and adult generativity
If you are going to study the life stories of highly generative adults, you first need a way of deciding who those adults are. Ed de St. Aubin and I developed a conceptual model for generativity along with self-report scales and other measures to assess individual differences in various components of generativity (e.g., McAdams & de St. Aubin, 1992).
Our thinking was strongly influenced by Ernest Becker’s remarkable book, The Denial of Death (1973). As many existential psychologists know better than I, Becker argued that human beings engage in a range of life projects – from creating art to building societal institutions – as a way of finding meaningful permanence in the face of mortality. While our efforts are ultimately in vain (dust to dust, you know), we nonetheless work hard to create products and outcomes that will outlive our self, as legacies that we offer up to posterity:
“Who knows what form the forward momentum of life will take in the time ahead or what use it will make of our anguished searching? The most that any of us can seem to do is to fashion something – an object or ourselves – and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force”. (Becker, 1973, p. 173, italics added).
Following Otto Rank, Becker used the term heroism to describe this process of fashioning something out of the self and then offering it up as a gift to the future. From the lens of narrative identity research, I would call that generativity.
But Becker helped me and my research group develop a more muscular conception of generativity than you will typically find in Erikson. Generativity is not just about care. There is more agency in it, more self, more narcissism even. Generativity is about the quest for symbolic immortality as much as it is about care and kindness. It is about generating something or someone, nurturing and cultivating it, and then letting it go as a legacy of the self for future generations.
The central question of generativity is this: How can I fashion a gift? More than Erikson, Becker (1973) understood the complex dynamics of generativity, even though he never used the term. Or at least that is how Becker spoke to me when I first read him.
The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (2013), by Dan P. McAdams
The redemptive self
A couple decades of research later, we now know that highly generative American adults tend—more than their less generative counterparts—to construe their lives as tales of redemption (McAdams, 2013). Replicated empirical studies (e.g., McAdams & Guo, 2015) and case biographies demonstrate that midlife American adults who score high on well-validated measures of generativity often construct variations on a general story type that I call the redemptive self. It is a heroic tale, of the sort Becker (1973) might like, and one that resonates with a long-standing American mythos.
In the redemptive self, a gifted (special, chosen, lucky) protagonist journeys forth into a dangerous world (where bad things happen to other people) and—equipped with moral steadfastness and a sense of personal manifest destiny—overcomes adversity and turns suffering into enhancement, with the expectation of continuing to exert a positive impact on future generations.
This kind of story supports generativity in many ways. For example, by juxtaposing the ideas that (1) “the world is dangerous” and (2) “I am special,” the story challenges the main character to commit to prosocial projects of various kinds, as a way of giving back in gratitude. By suggesting that suffering can often be overcome, furthermore, the story gives the generative adult the confidence that the hard work and many setbacks that generativity typically entails will eventually yield dividends. If you are going to be a generative person in America, it is highly likely that you’ll construct a redemptive story for your life.
Redemptive selves, Albert Camus, and Covid-19
The psychological power of redemptive life stories has been demonstrated in dozens of empirical studies (Dunlop, 2021; Perlin & Fivush, 2021). The broad conception of the redemptive self has even been characterized as a master cultural narrative in American society, charting a broadly accepted story among Americans about how to live a good life (McAdams, 2013; McLean & Syed, 2015).
The New York Times columnist David Brooks has suggested that Americans look to redemptive stories to help them make sense of life during times of crisis. In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Brooks expressed the hope that Americans will find long-term redemptive meaning in the wake of the virus. He wrote: “We will look back on this as one of the most meaningful periods in our lives.” Our long-term well-being depends on
“the story we tell about this moment. It’s the way we tie our moment of suffering to a larger narrative of redemption. It’s the way we then go out and stubbornly live out that story. The plague today is an invisible monster, but it gives birth to a better world.” (Brooks, 2020).
Well, maybe for some people, but maybe not for many others.
Clockwise from top left: Albert Camus; The Plague, written by Camus in 1947; The Triumph of Death (1562), painted by Pieter Bruegel, on display in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.
In characterizing Covid-19 as “the plague,” Brooks (2020) gestures to Albert Camus’ (1947) novel of the same name. Considered one of the canonical literary works in the existentialist tradition, The Plague tells the story of a virus spreading uncontrollably through a small city on the Algerian coast. For a year, the citizens are locked down and cut off from the rest of the world, as the epidemic claims tens of thousands of lives. Then, one day, the dying ends for no apparent reason. The afflicted begin to recover. The survivors rejoice. It seems like a happy ending.
But the novel’s protagonist, Dr. Rieux, cautions against a redemptive interpretation:
“The tale could not be one of final victory. It could be only the record of what had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilence, strive their utmost to be healers”. (Camus, 1947, p. 278).
As the protagonist of the novel, Dr. Rieux works tirelessly to be a “healer.” But here is the irony: He never heals anybody. Despite his best efforts and up until the virus seems to change its mind, every one of his patients dies.
The Plague is not a heroic story about overcoming adversity. “There’s no heroism in this,” Rieux says. “It’s a matter of common decency” (p. 150). The Plague is instead a more sober story of managing adversity in a world that invokes random acts of suffering while sorely testing the limits of human agency. As the protagonist of the story, Dr. Rieux’s role is to comfort people and validate their suffering. As the novel’s narrator, Dr. Rieux’s role is to bear witness to the suffering and the death he has seen—to tell the story, so that we never forget the suffering.
Reprising themes in the psychological literature on wisdom (e.g., Grossmann, 2017) and ego integrity (Erikson, 1963), The Plague suggests a broad cultural narrative that runs counter to the redemptive self. I call it a narrative of radical acceptance (McAdams, Logan, & Reischer, under review), and I believe it is the kind of life story that becomes more prevalent as people move through midlife and into old age. In this kind of story, the setting is a world of uncertainty, unpredictable change, and serendipity – akin, for many people, to life in the time of Covid-19.
The idealized goal in the radical acceptance narrative is to come to terms with life, reconcile conflict to minimize regret, to manage adversity (because adversity cannot always be overcome), and to sustain bonds of intimacy and warmth. With personal qualities like grace, humility, common decency, flexibility, and relentless compassion, Dr. Rieux is one model of the kind of protagonist who flourishes in this sort of post-redemptive-self narrative.
As both Camus and Becker knew, the plague – in one form or another – will always be with us. We need to be aware of our constraints. We need to be clear-eyed in the face of our limitations. We need to learn how to live with adversity when we cannot fully defeat it. And, like Dr. Rieux, we need to bear witness.
Dan P. McAdams is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology and Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University. Professor McAdams received his BS degree from Valparaiso University in 1976 and his PhD in psychology and social relations from Harvard University in 1979. Honored as a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern, Professor McAdams teaches courses in Personality Psychology, Adult Development and Aging, Theories of Human Development, the Psychology of Life Stories, and other topics.