Rereading Personal Narrative and Life Course : New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, Number 145

This volume reflects on the place of narrative interpretation in life course developmental theory. Featuring exciting chapters by the leading figures in narrative psychology, it provides insights on the narrative character in early childhood, adolescence, emerging adulthood, midlife, and old age. Read together, the chapters form a comprehensive description of narrative’s origins in childhood conversations and the multiple uses that narrative is used as lives unfold over developmental and historical time. A touchstone text in human development, it is a way for psychologists to rethink their approach to development through the lens of a narrative perspective that is sensitive to interpretation and context in human lives. This is the 145th volume in this Jossey-Bass series New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development . Its mission is to provide scientific and scholarly presentations on cutting edge issues and concepts in this subject area. Each volume focuses on a specific new direction or research topic and is edited by experts from that field. "This volume is a reflection on life course developmental theory. In particular, the volume argues for the centrality of narrative interpretation for human development. As a point of departure, we begin from Bertram Joseph Cohler's (1938-2012) seminal contribution to our understanding of developmental psychology. During his prolific career, Cohler published over 200 papers and book chapters. But, Cohler's (1982) chapter Personal Narrative and Life Course is clearly one of the most influential. The chapter is one of the first published manuscripts in psychology on the process of storytelling for establishing selfhood and identity and one of the first essays on what would later become narrative psychology"--Page 2.