The Self as Story: Rethinking Identity through Narrative
What if the Self is nothing more than a story? According to Dan McAdams, it might be.
Well, not a metaphorical one, but a structured, evolving narrative we construct to make sense of who we are. This is the core of McAdams’ narrative identity theory, which argues that we form identity by internalizing and continuously revising a life story that integrates the past, situates the present, and anticipates the future.
This theory reframes identity not as a fixed trait or singular origin, but as an ongoing act of meaning-making. In McAdams’ view, we are narrative beings shaped by language, context, and the need to create coherence.
Identity as a Temporal Construction
Narrative identity bridges time. It allows us to feel like the same person across years of change. And yet, as philosophers like Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor have argued, this coherence is not natural, but crafted. The narrative self is not just a record of events, but a curated and interpretive structure, influenced by social norms, moral frameworks, and relational dynamics.
Importantly, narrative identity doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. Our stories draw from cultural scripts, inherited ideologies, and relational feedback. What counts as “growth,” “success,” or even “trauma” is filtered through the interpretive lenses available to us. As such, the self is always situated and constructed within a specific moral, historical, and political context.
From Description to Direction
McAdams distinguishes between two common narrative forms:
Redemptive stories, in which suffering leads to transformation
Contamination stories, in which positive events are spoiled by later misfortune
These structures don’t just describe life; they shape how we experience it. They influence what we remember, what we emphasize, and how we imagine the future. A redemptive narrative might sustain hope and resilience. A contamination narrative might breed mistrust or a sense of inevitability.
This aligns with existential and phenomenological insights about temporality and meaning: we do not merely live our lives, we interpret them, often in retrospect, through frameworks that give them narrative order.
The Implications for Psychology and Beyond
Narrative identity challenges the notion that the self is something we simply uncover. Instead, it suggests that the self is something we actively produce, revise, and perform, echoing Michel Foucault’s claim that identity is less a discovery than a practice.
It also invites us to take seriously the moral and political dimensions of self-construction. Whose stories are legitimized? Whose identities are made coherent within dominant cultural frameworks, and whose are rendered incoherent or unintelligible?
Understanding the self as narrative offers a bridge between psychology and the humanities. It connects the clinical with the cultural, the personal with the political. And it reminds us that identity is never merely given, but told.
