Personology and the Narrative Interpretation of Lives

Personology is the science of persons. In this article we show that the concept of person presupposes the continuity of experience and that the storylike structure of lives makes narrative the most promising methodology. Researchers use first-person narratives as source material and third-person narratives in describing and interpreting lives because the temporal nature of experience makes it difficult for human beings not to attribute order, direction, and purpose to experience. It is because lives are structured through experience in a storylike manner that their study takes the narrative form. Psychologists' attempts to understand the person are traced from James and Freud, through Murray and Erikson, to Tompkins, McAdams, and Hermans and Kempen. We outline each psychologist's concept of person and show how their case studies illustrate their use of narrative methodology. Personology is the science of persons. Its aim is to organize and interpret lives of individual human beings. Central to this science must be (a) the understanding of what we mean by the concept "person," and (b) the development of methods for understanding the lives of persons as the "long unit for psychology" (Murray, 1938). In this article we will show that the concept of person presupposes the continuity of experience, which entails beginnings, middles, and ends. With regard Preparation of this article was supported, in part, by a grant from Dalhousie University's Research and Development Fund to the first author and by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to the second author. This support is gratefully acknowledged. We also wish to thank Phebe Cramer and two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions for revisions of the original manuscript. Requests for reprints should be sent to John Barresi, Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 4J1. Joumal of Personality 65:3, September 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Duke University Press. 694 Barresi and Juckes to methodology, we will argue that the storylike structure of personal lives makes narrative the most promising approach to the study of persons (Bruner, 1990; Cohler, 1982; Maclntyre, 1981; Polkinghorne, 1988; Sarbin, 1986). To achieve these goals, we will review the concept of person in the history of personological psychology and consider the ways in which individual life histories have been studied. Building on the foundation provided by William James, we review the contributions of Sigmund Freud, Henry Murray, and Erik Erikson, as well as those of contemporary researchers, including Tomkins, McAdams, and Hermans and Kempen. The Science of Persons Personology is the science of persons, but what is a person? At least since the time of John Locke a person has been treated as a psychological category whose central concept is self-consciousness. Somewhat more precisely we can define a person as a unity that is a self-conscious agent, an intentional being. As such, it has purposes of which it is aware, and knowledge that it uses to achieve its purposes. This unity has a past it remembers as its own and a future it feels itself tending toward by its actions in the present. It feels that it has a power to act and accept responsibility for its actions. To be a person is to be aware of one's self as a person, to be able to reflect on one's past and future, and to see one's present as continuously connected to one's past and future. It is essential to one's status as a person to experience the events of which one is a part as extended in time, having beginnings, middles, and ends. One's experiences and actions in the present are seen as an embedded part of an extended representation of one's own existence through time and in relation to a world in which one acts. We experience events in terms of our intentions and purposes, our beliefs and desires, our fears, hopes, and dreams. We experience ourselves and our lives as having an ongoing storylike structure, the meaning of which constantly transforms itself, often becoming more apparent to us through time. Although we are not constantly narrating the story of our lives, we are always in the midst of storylike transformations in the structure of our experience and activities, reinterpreting the past, and anticipating further developments in a story in which we see ourselves as central figures. In one way or another, most recent studies of individual lives make narrative central to their method. But as we will show through our