Life can take curious turns. I (CC) would have never thought I would do a PhD. Some years later, I would have never thought I would edit a book. In fact, I did not deem myself able to do either. Tilmann Habermas inspired me to do both. His teaching and mentoring guided me toward the professional path I took and transformed me into the researcher I am today.
“How have you become the person you are today?” Asking this question directed the unique and impactful longitudinal study MainLife, which traced the experience of personhood as sustained by life stories. Based on the seminal theoretical framework he developed with Susan Bluck (Reference Habermas and Bluck2000; Bluck & Koch, Chapter 2), Tilmann Habermas developed and started MainLife in the early 2000s and maintained it for twenty years. Around the same time, in 2005, I (AB) started my PhD project on social and cultural influences on life story development, and Tilmann Habermas became a member of my PhD committee. After my dissertation, he graciously invited me to participate in many symposia on life story research. I had started my research as a member of the “cognitive camp,” but over the years, conversations with Tilmann Habermas have – ever so slowly – opened my mind to the “narrative camp” and, thus, deepened my understanding of life story psychology. Indeed, Tilmann Habermas is one of the few scholars who joined the methodological approaches of the relatively isolated research fields of autobiographical memory and narrative identity in his research on life stories (Hirst & Camia, Chapter 3). Therefore, this book aims to reach two goals: first, to honor Tilmann Habermas’ generative achievements for the field, and second, to promote the dialogue between research on narrative identity and autobiographical memory.
“How have you become the person you are today?” Answering this question leads individuals to construct their narrative identity, referring to their internalized and evolving life story (McAdams, Reference McAdams1993). Life stories are grounded in autobiographical memory and provide the basis for the experience of personhood, that is, the experience of being an enduring individual with a past, present, and future in a certain culture at a certain time. Whenever individuals remember their past, they do so for specific purposes, causing very specific person–environment interactions, mostly in the form of conversations. Considering this ecology of autobiographical memory (Neisser, Reference Neisser, Gruneberg, Morris and Sykes1978), Theo Waters, Nicole Alea, and Susan Bluck (Chapter 4) specify three criteria for the adaptive function of autobiographical memory for which individuals reminisce and which are also apparent in narrative structures such as the life story. The functional approach is intuitively appealing and seems promising in integrating research on narrative identity and autobiographical memory.
While the functions of autobiographical memory explain why people remember, the cultural environment partially explains what people remember and, in the next step, selects the life events included in their life stories. The cultural life script, the common knowledge of how a prototypical life course in one’s culture looks like (Berntsen & Rubin, Reference Berntsen and Rubin2004), is decisive for the life events individuals deem appropriate and important for their life stories and, hence, is highly influential for personal narratives. While this has been studied extensively in the field of autobiographical memory (e.g., Anne & Janssen, Reference Anne and Janssen2021; Bohn, Reference Bohn2010; Camia, Reference Camia2025; Hatiboğlu & Habermas, Reference Hatiboğlu and Habermas2016; Rubin et al., Reference Rubin, Berntsen and Hutson2009; Thomsen & Berntsen, Reference Thomsen and Berntsen2008), we, Christin Camia and Annette Bohn (Chapter 5), look at cultural life scripts from the perspective of narrative identity and, in accord with five defining features (McLean & Syed, Reference McLean and Syed2016), conceptualize them as master narratives. This new perspective on cultural life scripts revealed not only how pivotal the cultural environment is for life stories but also the importance of the proximal social environment in which autobiographical memories and personal narratives are formed.
One of the most important relationships shaping memories and narratives is the mother–child bond. Elaine Reese eloquently and impressively shows (Chapter 6) that mothers’ elaborative reminiscing with young children is critical for children’s later autobiographical memory and narrative skills. Building on their richer memory bank, children with highly elaborative mothers draft more causally coherent life stories and report greater well-being in adolescence and young adulthood. Indeed, despite the rather individualistic view life stories may invite on persons, autobiographical memories and personal narratives are nothing without significant others. The existence of this book, and, more specifically, Monisha Pasupathi (Chapter 7), touchingly shows that we shape each other’s life courses and the ways we autobiographically reason about our lives and look at ourselves. Azriel Grysman (Chapter 8) reveals through an innovative study and coding methodology that our autobiographical meaning making is not only informed but partially done by significant others. These relationships and voices stay in our personal narratives, even in the physical absence of these significant others. Parents, for example, are not only part of the content of personal narratives but also influence narrative themes well into adulthood (Kristina Klug et al., Chapter 9). While we may think we have our own version of our life story, others exert more influence on our self-storying than we might be aware of. Moreover, these significant others also have their version of our life courses, and these different versions unite in vicarious life stories (Dorthe Thomsen & David Pillemer, Chapter 10).
Yet, the social environment is not always helpful in developing autobiographical memory and (vicarious) narrative identity. Children and adolescents going through adverse childhood experiences and growing up in foster care have difficulties ordering their life stories into a comprehensible temporal timeline yet still succeed in building causal-motivational and thematic coherence. These rare insights from narratives by institutionalized adolescents, provided by Margarida Henriques and colleagues (Chapter 11), inform and encourage us that individuals can develop healthy narrative identities, even if their life courses deviate from the norm.
A healthy narrative identity, however, is not necessarily a coherent one, at least not in the sense in which narrative coherence has been traditionally studied. Robyn Fivush (Chapter 12) challenges us to consider the specific person–environment interactions in which narratives are drafted and under which coherence may or may not be formed. Indeed, narrative coherence may not only be evident as defined in our coding schemes (Habermas et al., Reference Hatiboğlu and Habermas2015; Reese et al., Reference Reese, Haden, Baker-Ward, Bauer, Fivush and Ornstein2011) but emerge between speaker and listener as a common understanding of their shared reality. Other experiences, in contrast, may not evolve into coherent narratives or only after sufficient time because negative or unusual experiences are difficult to explain to others, especially those living outside of one’s own reality.
Speaking of unknown realities, we are proud and grateful that Tabea Wolf, Deniz Asolar, and Ali Tekcan grant us rare insights into life stories from unique, some might say “deviant” samples that are difficult to study and, consequently, have been underrepresented in previous research. Although nuns cannot draw on cultural norms and expectations as internalized by the cultural life script, their life stories nevertheless show an interesting balance of cultural embeddedness and their clearly different trajectory into consecrated life (Tabea Wolf, Chapter 13). However, this equilibrium of cultural integration and individual life course decreases drastically in Turkish LGBQ individuals’ life stories. Knowing they are a highly deviant and marginalized minority, they remember positive idiosyncratic life experiences to nourish a positive self-view rather than life experiences fitting the majority life script (Deniz Asolar and Ali Tekcan, Chapter 14).
In this regard, life stories seem a good device to sustain and regain a sense of self and purpose. Remembering unusual, negative, or traumatic life events, sharing these in personal narratives, and finding empathetic listeners help to develop a perspective on one’s autobiography and actors therein, regulate emotions in hindsight, and bring in order what was previously lost in the chaos of adverse experiences (Eleonora Bartoli & Mariam Fishere, Chapter 15). Mélissa Allé and colleagues (Chapter 16) insightfully show us that everybody’s life story seems to hold this curative potential. Even in the face of severe psychopathologies, some narrative tools are preserved and might be a good therapeutic start to turn life narratives into a healing place.
Having touched on cognitive, social, developmental, and clinical psychology in the chapters of this book, it becomes evident that autobiographical memory and narrative identity complement each other and venerably talk to several subdisciplines of psychology and beyond. Tilmann Habermas elaborates in his conclusion (Chapter 17) how productive it can be to take the way people understand themselves and others in the most complex, biographical way as an object of interest and research. Looking back at his own academic journey, Tilmann Habermas reminds us of theorists and empiricists whose shoulders we stand on and, once again, offers guidance on how the field of life stories might evolve. As the authors of this book demonstrate, this history of life story research may overlap with our life stories as researchers, both those we have been and those we will become.
