Ruthellen Josselson

• Ph.D.
• Fielding Graduate University

Qualitative Psychology intends to lead the way in proposing ways to incorporate qualitative inquiry in the psychology curriculum. In this special issue, we begin with undergraduate training and have invited two people, Linda McMullen and Cynthia Winston-Proctor, who have thought a great deal about this, to assemble articles that offer ideas for how...

In this issue, we take up a timely topic in our special section, that of migration and citizenship. We are especially pleased that we have an opportunity to hear from European and U.K. qualitative social psychologists who explore these questions in creative ways.

The American Psychological Association Publications and Communications Board Working Group on Journal Article Reporting Standards for Qualitative Research (JARS–Qual Working Group) was charged with examining the state of journal article reporting standards as they applied to qualitative research and with generating recommendations for standards tha...

This issue of Qualitative Psychology is a special issue edited by Valerie Futch Ehrlich, who has invited articles that demonstrate the particular contribution qualitative inquiry can make to the study of Positive Youth Development. The journal editor welcomes two new Associate Editors: Heidi Levitt and Mary Gergen.

We address the significance and implications of the formal entry of qualitative inquiry into the American Psychological Association. In our view, the discipline is enriched in new and important ways. Most prominently, the qualitative movement brings with it a pluralist orientation to knowledge and to practices of inquiry. Adding to the traditional...

Introduces a new journal entitled Qualitative Psychology. The inception of this journal (as well as of the Society of Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology, a section of Division 5 of the American Psychological Association) is a realization of the idea that human lives are what psychology can and should be about, broadened to focus more rigorously on h...

This chapter is a contrast of parallel biographies, one of Henry Murray, the other of Christiana Morgan—two people in a complex relationship with one another—and my aim is to analyze the ways in which this relationship has been narrated (and thereby constructed) by the biographers. When relationships structure or center a life, they become supremel...

The editor of Qualitative Psychology , hopes that this publication can gather together the best work that conceptualizes and applies qualitative inquiry to a range of psychological questions and realizes the potential of qualitative approaches to human experience. The Journal’s mission will be to create an outlet for innovative methodological, theo...

Erikson's comprehensive theory of human development has been empirically validated by personality researchers who have taken a status approach to the adult stages of the life cycle: Identity, Intimacy, Generativity and Integrity. An understanding of these stages has implications for psychotherapy. Erikson's theory provides a descriptive language fo...

A detailed reading of Obama's autobiographical Dreams from my Father is conducted to illuminate psychological understanding of the challenges of multiple identity, challenges that occur at both deeply emotional as well as cognitive levels of experience. The aim is to extend conceptualization of the space between psychic reality and socially constru...

Increasing numbers of people manage multiple racial, ethnic, national, or gender identities. The question explored in this book is how people navigate a variety of socially constructed but deeply embodied identities, in a variety of circumstances and contexts. This first chapter provides the theoretical and organization context for the book. Addres...

In our increasingly complex globalized world, many people carry distinct, often conflicting, psychosocial identities. People live at the edges of more than one communal affiliation, bridging loyalties and identifications. This book is designed to explore how people attain or maintain personal integration in the face of often-shifting experiences of...

Atwood describes a relational, humanistic, existential, and psychodynamic approach to treating seriously mentally ill clients and calls for a restoration of psychology as a human science. In our response, we echo Atwood’s values and explore the phenomena of serious mental illness from the point of view of the patient’s subjectivity and lived experi...

This paper examines the dilemmas in narrative research created by the gaps between the authority of experience (the participant’s understanding of his or her life) and the authority of expertise (the researcher’s interpretive analysis of that life). It raises the question of who, at various levels, "owns" the narrative. Using a detailed case exampl...

The Narrative Study of Lives (TNSL) was a series of eleven edited volumes which appeared (more or less annually) for the first time in 1993 and the last time in 2007. We co-edited all these volumes, the last five in conjunction with Dan McAdams as a third co-editor. The mission of the volumes was to provide a prominent space for the publication of...

This study analyzes the self-constructing meanings of an autobiographical episode in the life of one woman told at repeated intervals over 35 years. It demonstrates the ways in which the present constructs the past and shows how autobiographical memory may be used dialogically to create and contrast with current self-constructions, to disavow intol...

Narrative and identity are concepts that contain the paradoxes of personhood: they encompass the problem of continuity and change over the life course and the phenomena of meaning-making. Both –fuzzy— and fluid in their definitions, they denote but do not limit the ways in which people make sense of their experiences and locate themselves in societ...

This volume is an effort to cast a wide net in order to bring the meanings of others to the forefront of psychological investigation, to illuminate what is an often obscured background. Efforts to measure relationships, although they have produced large bodies of research studies, inevitably simplify and decontextualize relationship. Relationships...

Narrative research has produced an array of richly-detailed expositions of life as lived, well-interpreted studies full of nuance and insight that befit the complexity of human lives. This paper inquires into the necessity and possibilities of amalgamation of knowledge obtained through narrative research. As narrative studies, with their accompanyi...

In Identity and Story: Creating Self in Narrative, the fourth volume in the Narrative Study of Lives series, Dan P. McAdams, Ruthellen Josselson, and Amia Lieblich (2006) bring together an interdisciplinary and international group of creative researchers and theorists to examine how the stories we tell create our identities. An increasing number o...

Ricoeur distinguishes between two forms of hermeneutics: a hermeneutics of faith which aims to restore meaning to a text and a hermeneutics of suspicion which attempts to decode meanings that are disguised. In this paper, his distinction is applied to interpretive stances in narrative research. From the point of view of a hermeneutics of faith, the...

How does context shape biography? How do language and relationships affect the development of people's work lives? An international group of scholars from diverse disciplines address these and other issues in the latest volume of "The Narrative Study of Lives." They explore what it means to take narrative seriously and how an empathic stance in nar...

Therapy is the process of developing a narrative that helps bring integration and coherence to a chaotic life. In Healing Plots: The Narrative Basis of Psychotherapy, the third volume in the series The Narrative Study of Lives, editors Amia Lieblich, Dan P. McAdams, and Ruthellen Josselson bring together a diverse group of psychotherapist-scholars...

An 8-dimensional model of interpersonal relatedness, derived from existing theories of relationship as well as a phenomenological study, is applied to understanding the space between people in group therapy. Relational development is conceptualized as parallel streams of growth along separate dimensions, which may involve stronger relational capaci...

Notes that the old patterns of writing research proposals are unsuitable for writing master's and doctoral theses using narrative approaches. In that narrative research is a voyage of discovery--a discovery of meaning that both constitute the individual participant and are co-constructed in the research process--researchers cannot know at the outse...

Brings together a diverse group of narrative research scholars who share their actual experiences of learning, teaching, working, and growing in this field. It is argued that the wide variety of innovative approaches and expansive theoretical perspectives they offer will be helpful to those who are learning or teaching qualitative methods. Chapter...

In the psychological literature, empathy has been regarded as either a cognitive, an affective, or a multidimensional phenomenon and there has been much controversy about its nature. This phenomenological study focuses on how the theoretical discussion of the cognitive-affective nature of empathy finds expression in the experiential realm. Findings...

Earliest and second-earliest memories were collected from 24 participants at three time points (ages 21, 33, and 43) over 22 years, and were examined for stability and change in thematic material. Results indicate that early memories are largely stable, but the nuances of the thematic portrayals reflect personality change as well. Participants' bio...

How deeply worried self-made man is in his need to feel safe in his man-made world, can be seen from the deep inroad which an unconscious identification with the machine…has made on the Western concept of human nature…The desperate need to function smoothly and cleanly, without friction, sputtering, or smoke, has attached itself to the ideas of per...

Entering into a true relationship with an individual implies acknowledging his inner complexity. His account can constitue a means of comprehending this individual, in so far as the listener admits that this account, bearing the mark of the internal work of the ego, in no way constitutes a finished story but rather a miror of the intrapsychic devel...

Entrer dans une relation vraie avec un individu suppose d'apprehender sa complexite interne. Le recit peut constituer une voie de comprehension de cet individu, pour autant que l'ecoutant admette que ce recit, portant la marque du travail interne du moi, ne constitue en aucun cas une histoire mais un miroir de l'evolution intrapsychique du sujet.

Questions about how women integrate maternity into their sense of self have generated a quest for an heuristic model. We suggest that mothers struggle to balance themselves amid a set of polarities/tensions and that mothering can be situated within a phenomenological matrix of such tensions. We propose a model that includes the following developmen...

Comments on the article by R. Madigan et al (see record 1995-31466-001) regarding their analysis of the epistemological implications of APA style. The authors argue that as postmodern and feminist awareness seeps into psychology, the practice of disengaged prose, passive voice, attribution of agency to the inanimate, insistence on universal laws,...

This volume is an effort to offer examples of the ideological, moral, emotional, and practical complexities that attend the doing of narrative research. The contributors have written in response to [the author's] invitation to speak from their own experience, to tell about the ethical and procedural dilemmas they have faced and how they have come...

Integrating psychological theories with empirical evidence, the author of this volume draws fundamental conclusions about the nature and types of relationships, and develops eight dimensions of relatedness ranging from the very casual to the deeply intimate. Each chapter examines a particular dimension and includes a brief life history of a person...

The purpose of this Annual is to publish studies of actual lives in progress, studies which use qualitative methods of investigation within a theoretical context drawn from psychology or other disciplines. The aim is to promote the study of lives and life history as a means of examining, illuminating, and spurring theoretical understanding. "The Na...

Psychoanalytic developmental theory takes as its premise that the central thrust of human development is movement from a state of dependence and merger to a state of independent, differentiated selfhood. When we think about the self, or identity, we are inclined to envision a person standing alone, somehow being what he or she is, apart from all ot...

Early memories were obtained from women in the four identity status categories and rated for developmental level in an effort to assess deeper aspects of personality development that underlie identity formation. In contrast to some previous research which has found similarities between Achievement and Foreclosure women and between Moratorium and Di...

This paper explores the phenomenological and psychodynamic differences between girls who score at the high and low extremes of the Psychosocial Maturity Inventory. Ability to tolerate anxiety and the developmental use of interpersonal relationships are discussed as central to identity formation among these girls.

This paper explores the phenomenological and psychodynamic differences between adolescent boys who score at the high and low extremes of the Psychosocial Maturity Inventory. The development of psychosocial maturity is viewed against the background of adolescent ego development. The freedom from impulse, the gains in self-esteem, the resolution of s...

The educational community lacks tools for assessing the nonacademic growth of students — their growth as persons and as social beings. This paper describes the development of an attitude inventory based on an interdisciplinary model of psychosocial maturity. The Psychosocial Maturity Inventory, a self-report instrument, is comprised of nine subscal...

This intensive clinical study investigated the role of developmental and psychodynamic forces in the identity formation of 48 randomly selected college senior women. Using Marcia's four identity statuses as a typology of the forms that late adolescent identity formation may take, this research explored the intrapsychic aspects which are central to...

In this new book, Ruthellen Josselson fills a critical gap in the literature on women by presenting the first study to examine how women go about the task of finding their individual identities. Going beyond other research on female psychology, which is often limited to the study of women psychotherapy patients, Josselson chooses ordinary women as...

Like Pygmalion with his Galatea, we create the characters of people in our lives. Although others appear to us to be just who they "are," there are complicated psychological processes, outside of our awareness, that lead us to experience people in ways that we ourselves construct. Psychoanalytic theory offers a wealth of understanding of how people...

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