PSYB30H3 Lecture 17: Lecture 17 - notes
Document Summary
Mcadams believes that this life-narrative approach offers a third tier in our understanding of persons. [ 1st tier level of personality traits psychology of the stranger; 2nd tier characteristic motivational, developmental adaptations that people make as they bring their traits into the world]. To truly understand a person, you need to move to the life-story level, where everything becomes meaningful and becomes organized, and it gives us that sense of unity and purpose. It"s important to distinguish agency and communion from each other. Mcadams" view of life-story formation is very much in line with a broad framework, first developed in the. 1960"s, by david bakan ( the duality of human existence ). Bakan and others after him have argued that for all the varieties that make up human experience, we can distill 2 fundamental themes in everything that is essentially human: themes related to agency and themes related to communion.
