The meaning of others: Narrative studies of relationships.

Abstract

Over the past several years, psychology has begun to revise its vision of the self-contained individual, while devoting more attention to relational, ecological models of self. Evolving alongside this broader conceptualization of the self have been qualitative methods of studying the self-in-relationship. Building on their previous volumes in the Narrative Study of Lives series, editors Josselson, Lieblich, and McAdams illustrate the potential for narrative analysis to present new insights on human relationships. Here, they present creative exemplars of studies on how relationships with parents, friends, peers, therapists, and even members of Internet communities affect such challenging human processes as acculturation, racial identity development, secure attachment, career choice, care giving, and grief. This volume will be of interest to those who seek a more complex understanding of the experience of relationship in human development. Therapists, researchers and students of developmental, personality and clinical psychology will find much in this book that will conceptually illuminate human relationship in context and in its many narratively-structured possibilities for meaning.