Self-Representation: Life Narrative Studies in Identity and Ideology

(Hardback)

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This work offers a new approach to the study of self-representation, utilizing both the older "study of lives" tradition in personality psychology as well as the newer "narratvie psychology". By applying the structuralist and semiotic methods developed by cultural anthropologists to the analysis of life-historical interviews, Gary S. Gregg presents a generative theory of self-representation. He addresses not only investigations of cognition, such as how knowledge of the self is represented, what the elementary units of self-cognition are, and how cognition and affect are linked. The book begins with a brief introduction, then presents a re-analysis of two famous case studies: Freud's "Rat Man" and "Mack and Larry" from "The Authoritarian Personality": Greg explores the ideological dimension of identity in order to raise the fundamental questions that the theory of self-representation will answer and provides initial obvservations from fieldwork in Morocco. Next he introduces the theoretical notion of structured ambiguity, before presenting three original life-narrative analyses and developing through them the "generative" or "structural" theory of self-representation. The work concludes with a theoretical chapter that synthesizes the preceding theories and observations, re-examines the questions posed by William James and George Herbert Mead about the self's unity and multiplicity, and outlines the structural theory of self-representation. This book should prove a valuable resource for courses in sociology, psychology, and anthropology, as well as an important tool for professionals in these fields.

Reviews

"This unique contribution to the psychology of personality is the most exciting reading in the field that I have encountered in a long time. . . . Gary Gregg has made a substantial contribution here to a humanistic psychology of interpretation, meaning, and value--but in a vein that can be conjoined with a scientific, explanatory psychology. . . . The result is breath-taking."-M. Brewster Smith Stevenson College University of California, Santa Cruz
. . . this is an exceptional book that represents an audacious attempt to arrive at an integrative, structural theory of the self, which builds on both classical sources and significant trends in contemporary psychology and anthropology.-Contemporary Psychology
." . . this is an exceptional book that represents an audacious attempt to arrive at an integrative, structural theory of the self, which builds on both classical sources and significant trends in contemporary psychology and anthropology."-Contemporary Psychology

Author Bio

GARY S. GREGG is a personality psychologist, currently a visiting scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, where he is translating and analyzing life-history interviews he conducted in southern Morocco.