The focus of this book is on the role of narrative analysis in the social sciences and in increasing our understanding of human lives and experiences. Contributors address such questions as: Should in-depth interviews become occasions in which to ask for life stories so as to enhance a study of social phenomena? Can a richer approach to psychological understanding be reached by studying how experience, conscious and unconscious, is organized, interpreted and reshaped throughout the life cycle? How can biographical work be used to shed light on the social construction of individual lives?...

Like Pygmalion with his Galatea, we create the characters of people in our lives. Although others appear to us to be who they just "are," there are complicated psychological processes, outside of our awareness, that lead us to experience people in ways that we ourselves construct. Psychoanalytic theory offers a wealth of understanding of how people unconsciously create what they both need and dread. But these processes are not well understood by most therapists. Too often, therapists join their patients in overlooking their own role in creating the relationships in their lives, such that it...

How do women create fulfilling lives? How does the identity they choose (or not choose) by the end of their college career affect how their lives unfold? For 35 years, Ruthellen Josselson has followed 25 randomly selected women who graduated from college in the early 1970s. Because these women came of age at this particular time in history, they were the trailblazers in creating new possibilities for women's lives by taking up meaningful roles in the work world. These "real" women, in contrast to the stereotypes of the time, took on the challenge in very different ways and championed very...