Elsevier

Current Opinion in Psychology

Volume 37, February 2021, Pages 49-53
Current Opinion in Psychology

The development of narrative identity and the emergence of personality disorders in adolescence

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2020.07.024Get rights and content

Narrative identity is likely to be important in the development of personality disorder (PD) in adolescence. Adolescents’ life narratives provide rich material that is near to their lived experiences and reveal individual differences in self and relatedness and in ways of constructing meaning. Narrative identity is linked with well-being and psychopathology and shapes coping with adversity. Preliminary research suggests that adolescents and adults with PD narrate their lives in ways that are more negative and express lower agency; narratives may also contain content reflecting PD symptoms. Youth’s narrative identities may express personality disturbances in self and relationship processes and may affect the consolidation of or recovery from emerging PD in the transition to adulthood — all possibilities worthy of future investigation.

Introduction

Adolescents spend considerable time and effort exploring and defining who they are as people; indeed, Erik Erikson argued that solving the crisis of identity versus role confusion is the pre-eminent developmental task of adolescence — a task that begins in adolescence and continues into adulthood [1]. One of the most critical ways that young people engage in identity development is by starting to narrate their lives as evolving stories, a domain of personality that McAdams and colleagues call narrative identity [2,3]. A narrative identity — or life story —integrates important past experiences, goals and values, and sense of meaning into a relatively coherent whole that can help direct individuals’ next steps in life [4,5]; it is this integrative function that sets narrative identity apart from other aspects of personality like traits and goals.

In this paper, we argue that narrative identity is likely to be important in the development of personality disorder in adolescence. Specifically, youth’s emerging narrative identities may express personality disturbances in self and relationship processes and may affect the consolidation of or recovery from PD in the transition to adulthood. The first author initially made this argument a decade ago [6], and in the intervening time, significant progress has been made in understanding both narrative identity and personality disorder (PD) in adolescence. Thus, in this update, we first summarize recent findings on narrative identity and highlight their relevance for PD in adolescence. Second, we review the as-yet limited studies linking PD with narrative identity in adolescence and early adulthood.

Section snippets

Narrative identity: recent findings and clinical implications for PD in adolescence

Life narratives are evolving stories about the self that contribute to a sense of identity, that is, they enable people to integrate their past experiences, as well as their current self and imagined future, into a more coherent whole; these stories of the self provide people with a sense of meaning and purpose [2,3]. Originally, researchers recommended comprehensive oral interviews to elicit narrative identities, though any combination of narrative length and format is possible [7••].

Preliminary evidence of links between narrative identity and personality disorders

Although there are compelling theoretical and empirical reasons to suspect that life narratives are important in PDs, only a handful of studies have examined the empirical links between the two. We review those here and offer sample narratives to illustrate the value in examining life narratives in relation to PD in adolescence.

Nearly all of the studies linking narrative identity and PD have focused on borderline PD (BPD). Identity disturbances are a hallmark feature of BPD and are included

Conclusions

Narrative identity offers a perspective on PD development in adolescence that considers youth’s life experiences and the ways that youth construct their overarching sense of self from those experiences. As the sample narratives in Box 1 demonstrate, adolescents’ life narratives offer rich material that is near to adolescents’ lived experiences, and these narratives reveal individual differences in the ways that youth construct their identities. Adolescent narrators vary in how they tell their

Conflict of interest statement

Nothing declared.

References and recommended reading

Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:

  • • of special interest

  • •• of outstanding interest

Acknowledgements

Funding: This work was supported by a Vidi grant of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (grant number 452–14-013) awarded to Theo A. Klimstra.

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