The Story of the Person: Integrating Personalist Philosophy with Narrative Psychology

Personalist philosophy, as articulated by individuals such as Clarke, bears a great similarity to narrative psychology. Because of these similarities, personalism is a useful philosophical framework to guide narrative psychology. This article sets out to (a) establish those similarities; (b) look at the relevance of self-determination theory to narrative psychology, especially given the role of the protagonist in any narrative; and (c) to make explicit the social nature of a person's narrative. Following this, the concepts explored are applied to the situation of first-generation college students by analyzing two prior studies of the population, “Ever upward and no turning back: Social mobility and identity formation among first generation college students,” by Roberts and Rosenwald (2001), and “Class jumping into academia: Multiple identities for counseling academics,” by Nelson, Englar-Carlson, Tierny, and Hau (2006).