Putting the Social into Personal Identity: The Master Narrative as Root Metaphor for Psychological and Developmental Science

“In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.” Erikson, 1968, p. 130“The ‘methodology of causation' can neither capture the social and personal richness of lives in a culture nor begin to plumb their historical depth. It is only through the application of interpretation that we, as psychologists, can do justice to the world of culture.” Bruner, 1990, p. 137On a hot summer night in Tel Aviv in 2005, a 17-year-old Jewish Israeli named Ayelet1 shared her views on a particularly divisive issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as part of a life-story interview:As much as I want to understand them the Palestinians, I can't give up my country. I can't give up Jerusalem. As much as I don't live there and I don't really go to the Wall and everything and don't pray and I'm not that religious. But still it's important for me, for my people.Just one year prior, during our initial life-story interview, Ayelet had passionately argued for the division of Jerusalem in the interest of peace see Hammack, 2011a. Now, one year later, and interestingly one year after she has engaged with Palestinians in intergroup dialogue, Ayelet presents a personal narrative subordinate to a collective, master narrative in which the discursive demands of social identity reign supreme. No longer do Ayelet's personal views on Jerusalem matter, for what matters to Ayelet is that her personal narrative aligns with a master narrative of a particular place - Jerusalem - and its significance to the collective. To make meaning of Ayelet's personal narrative, we need to recognize the salience of social identity in the course of human development. And we need to recognize the inherent limits to agency involved in the identity development process - a recognition facilitated by the internalized social speech Vygotsky, 1978 apparent in her personal narrative.When Ayelet was interviewed in 2005, the dominant ways of thinking about narrative identity tended to emphasize narratives as long-term autobiographical projects which provide a sense of psychological unity and coherence e.g., McAdams, 2001, or as discourses with which individuals engage in situated interactions e.g., Bamberg, 2004; see Thorne, 2004. Ayelet's narrative could be understood through the prism of both these general approaches. On the one hand, at age 17, she was just beginning to “get a life” Habermas Hammack, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011a, b; Hammack Cohler, 1982; Polkinghorne, 1988, our interpretive approach allowed us to apply a “hermeneutics of suspicion” Josselson, 2004 in which we could deeply interrogate Ayelet's production of a personal narrative over time. Applying narrative methods not just at the level of the person but also at the level of the culture, documenting not just the discourse of Ayelet's personal narrative but also the multiple discourses that proliferated in her social ecology of development and created multiple master narratives to which she was exposed Hammack, 2011a, we developed a theory and an approach to the study of narrative, identity, and culture that emphasized the mutual constitution of persons and settings through a process of narrative engagement Hammack, 2008, 2011a, b.The idea of master narrative engagement was intended to provide an integrative theory of human development, anchored in several long-established social science paradigms, grounded in the idea that persons and settings - selves and societies - are mutually constituted through a dynamic engagement with the symbolic meaning system of language in its storied form. Beyond anchoring perspectives on narrative identity development e.g., Bruner, 1990; Cohler, 1982; McAdams, 1996, 2001, life course developmental theory e.g., Elder, 1998, and cultural psychology e.g., Shweder, 1990, theoretical inspirations for the framework included Eriksonian identity theory e.g., Erikson, 1959, cultural-historical activity theory CHAT; e.g., Vygotsky, 1978, symbolic interactionism e.g., Mead, 1934, social identity theory Tajfel Tajfel Vygotsky, 1978, as well as symbolic interactionism's thesis of self-development through social interaction and the “conversation of gestures” Mead, 1934, provided us with a dynamic way of theorizing the link among narrative, identity, and culture see Hammack see Hammack Cohler, 1982; McAdams, Polkinghorne, 1986. 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