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Full-Text Articles in Psychology
The Narrative Reconstruction Of Psychotherapy, Jonathan Adler, Dan Mcadams
The Narrative Reconstruction Of Psychotherapy, Jonathan Adler, Dan Mcadams
Jonathan M. Adler
Going to psychotherapy represents an atypical, usually unanticipated, and often emotionally significant experience in the life course. As with many such events, people construct stories about therapy experiences in order to make sense out of them and to provide their lives with a sense of unity and purpose. Yet beyond these purposes, the storying of psychotherapy is also central to the maintenance of the therapeutic gains achieved during the course of treatment (e.g., Frank, 1961; Spence, 1982). In the present study, the psychotherapy stories of 76 community adults are assessed using grounded theory methodology to determine narrative patterns that distinguish …
The Narrative Reconstruction Of Psychotherapy And Psychological Health, Jonathan Adler, Lauren Skalina, Dan Mcadams
The Narrative Reconstruction Of Psychotherapy And Psychological Health, Jonathan Adler, Lauren Skalina, Dan Mcadams
Jonathan M. Adler
When people complete psychotherapy, they carry the story of the experience with them. This retrospective reconstruction serves several psychological purposes, including contributing to narrative identity and influencing the maintenance of therapeutic gains after termination. Based on a prior qualitative investigation of therapy narratives (Adler & McAdams, 2007a), a new sample of 104 former clients wrote about their psychotherapy after treatment end. Quantitative analyses indicated that the retrospective narratives of participants high in subjective well-being focused on the protagonist's agency in struggling with a discrete problem. In addition, the narratives of participants high in ego development described a coherent story of …
Emerging From The Cave: Attributional Style And The Narrative Study Of Identity In Midlife Adults, Jonathan Adler, Emily Kissel, Dan Mcadams
Emerging From The Cave: Attributional Style And The Narrative Study Of Identity In Midlife Adults, Jonathan Adler, Emily Kissel, Dan Mcadams
Jonathan M. Adler
It has been widely documented that individuals who explain negative life events with a depressogenic attributional style (stable, global attributions) tend to have increased rates of depression and other poor outcomes (e.g., Sweeny, Anderson, & Bailey, 1986). The Content Analysis of Verbatim Explanations (CAVE) is a method of assessing attributional style in spontaneously-generated causal attributions appearing in accounts of real events (Peterson, Schulman, Castellon, & Seligman, 1992). Seventy life story interviews obtained from a diverse community sample of midlife adults were coded for attributional style with the CAVE technique and also for the theme of contamination (scenes in which good …