Storytelling is central to human experience. Narrative analysis offers researchers a window into the way individuals make sense of their experiences and how their stories may be shaped by the cultural and societal categories they inhabit. This book is a step-by-step guide to the procedures of narrative analysis and offers a rich, extended case study to demonstrate the process.

People from Eastern and Western cultures have differences in their perception and understanding of the world that are not well represented by a collectivist/individualist distinction. Differences in worldview are inscribed in personal relationships and the ways in which people try to understand the "other" in relation to themselves. When people from the East and West encounter one another, these differences are brought to the fore in jarring moments of culture clash. Such encounters, seen through a contextualized narrative lens can offer insights for deeper cross-cultural knowing. In Narrative and Cultural Humility Ruthellen Josselson recounts her time teaching group therapy to Chinese therapists over the course of ten years and illustrates her own profound experience of cultural dissonance. For example, many of her students regarded her as what they termed "a good witch" seeing her as a transformative healer purveying something magical rather than a teacher of psychotherapy with theories and techniques that could be learned. At the same time, she was often mystified by their learning styles and organizational processes which were so different from her own experiences. In these instances, along with others chronicled in the book, Josselson confronts the foundational (and often unconscious) assumptions embedded in cultural worldviews (on both sides) that are manifest in nearly every interaction. This re-telling underscores the need for cultural humility when narrating one's experiences and the experiences of different relational cultures. While narrative is always rooted in culture-bound worldviews, it can also be a way of bridging them. Narrative and Cultural Humility ultimately tells the story of what it means to recognize our own unspoken assumptions to better connect with people of another culture. It also highlights the values and needs that are universally human.

Best Friends provides the missing link to understanding and recognizing the impact of some of the most important relationships in girls' and women's lives.

Every woman remembers the sting of betrayal of a girlfriend, and every parent of a daughter has seen her come home from school in tears because a girl she thought was her best friend suddenly and inexplicably became her enemy. While boys hash out differences with fists and kicks, girls' societies are marked by secrets and whispers and shifting affection. The lessons learned as an adolescent girl are often carried into adulthood, making women fear confrontation--especially with other women. But the intensity of the struggles reflects the support and healing to be found within these friendships. Girls find themselves in the mirror of other girls, hence the power each has to influence the other.

Ruthellen Josselson and Terri Apter's many years of working with hundreds of girls and women have given them insight into the emotionally important relationships that are integral to a girl's self-image. Best Friends explores the bonds of friendship between girls and between women and the sorrows and joys they experience together, from early adolescence and throughout their lives.

In 1972, Ruthellen Josselson was a young psychologist fascinated by the riddle of how a woman creates an identity and chooses one path over another in life--particularly in the face of the nascent feminist movement. Selecting at random thirty young women in their last year of college, Josselson undertook a ground-breaking study that would follow these women's personal odysseys over the next twenty-two years, from graduation to midlife. What she learned about the ways women reinvent themselves in an ever-changing world is the subject of Revising Herself, a myth-shattering look at both a unique generation of American women on the front lines of wrenching social change, and at the conflicts and compromises facing women today.

Allowing women to define themselves in their own terms, Revising Herself holds up a provocative mirror in which readers can reflect upon their own life choices, recognize themselves in these women's experiences, and gain new insight into how we construct our own identities over a lifetime.

How does a narrative serve as a way for uncovering and constructing a person's identity? Does a narrative differ in any systematic way from life as lived versus life as constructed by women and men? Addressing these and other issues related to the use of narratives for understanding human lives, Exploring Identity and Gender, the second volume in The Narrative Study of Lives annual book series, focuses on narratives of girls' and women's lives as well as other identity issues. Among the issues this volume addresses are individual identity in the context of a familial heritage and how one's sense of individuality relates to their style of management. The international team of authors also explores such issues as how women construct the lives of other women in biographical work, how individuals conduct their life episodes in patterns similar to the plots of stories, how the women's movement influenced three women's adult lives, and how girls' sense of themselves changes as they move into adolescence. Students and researchers will find Exploring Identity and Gender illuminating in the intelligent application of the use of narratives.

Engagingly written, this book builds the reader's skills for conducting in-depth interviews designed to address a particular research question. With an emphasis on the dynamics of the research relationship, Ruthellen Josselson artfully demonstrates the steps of a successful interview. Each step is illustrated with excerpts from interviews on diverse topics. The book describes how to structure interviews effectively, develop questions that elicit meaningful narratives, cultivate skills for empathic listening and responding, avoid common pitfalls, and deal with problems that develop in an interview. Pedagogical Features *Practice exercises adapted from Josselson's popular workshops. *Annotated examples of "good" and "bad" interviews. *A chapter on interviewing dos and don'ts. *Appendices with interview aids, sample follow-up questions, and a sample consent form.

Like Pygmalion with his Galatea, we create the characters of people in our lives. Although others appear to us to be who they just '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 unconsciously create what they both need and dread. But these processes are not well understood by most therapists. Too often, therapists join their patients in overlooking their own role in creating the relationships in their lives, such that it seems that patients were simply unfortunate to 'have' an un-giving mother or to 'find' an unloving spouse. Because processes of creation in relationship are largely unconscious, they are much harder to see. As a result, most theorists of relationships acknowledge that they exist, but offer little language or explication for how they unfold or manifest themselves. Playing Pygmalion is an effort to trace in psychological terms the subtle interplay by which people create the other. This book adapts the psychoanalytic concepts of transitional object usage and projective identification to show their importance and applicability beyond the therapeutic situation to the understanding of people's relational lives. Using examples from literature, film and clinical work to illustrate the theory, the book goes on to consider in depth the relationship narratives of four pairs of ordinary people to demonstrate how people unconsciously 'create' one another. The stories demonstrate that the 'other' is always more than one conceives him or her to be. Readers inevitably rethink some of their important relationships in terms of how they are creating people or being created by them. This may lead them to take in other aspects of the person, to see how they are looking very selectively at a human being who exists beyond their relationship. These stories also provide cautionary tales to therapists who begin to believe in the simple reality of their patients' constructions of important people in their lives.

Like Pygmalion with his Galatea, we create the characters of people in our lives. Although others appear to us to be who they just "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 unconsciously create what they both need and dread. But these processes are not well understood by most therapists. Too often, therapists join their patients in overlooking their own role in creating the relationships in their lives, such that it seems that patients were simply unfortunate to "have" an un-giving mother or to "find" an unloving spouse. Because processes of creation in relationship are largely unconscious, they are much harder to see. As a result, most theorists of relationships acknowledge that they exist, but offer little language or explication for how they unfold or manifest themselves. Playing Pygmalion is an effort to trace in psychological terms the subtle interplay by which people create the other. This book adapts the psychoanalytic concepts of transitional object usage and projective identification to show their importance and applicability beyond the therapeutic situation to the understanding of people's relational lives. Using examples from literature, film and clinical work to illustrate the theory, the book goes on to consider in depth the relationship narratives of four pairs of ordinary people to demonstrate how people unconsciously "create" one another. The stories demonstrate that the "other" is always more than one conceives him or her to be. Readers inevitably rethink some of their important relationships in terms of how they are creating people or being created by them. This may lead them to take in other aspects of the person, to see how they are looking very selectively at a human being who exists beyond their relationship. These stories also provide cautionary tales to therapists who begin to believe in the simpl

How do women create fulfilling lives? How does the identity they choose (or not choose) by the end of their college career affect how their lives unfold? For 35 years, Ruthellen Josselson has followed 26 randomly selected women who graduated from college in the early 1970s. Because these women came of age at this particular time in history, they were the trailblazers in creating new possibilities for women's lives and were among the first of the Women's Liberation Movement to take on meaningful roles in the work world. These "real" women, in contrast to the pervasive media stereotypes of the time, took on the challenge in very different ways and championed very different lives for themselves. In Paths to Fulfillment: Women's Search for Meaning and Identity, Josselson traces the stages of these women's lives and the ways in which identity, intimacy, and care for others over time leads to fulfillment, or in some cases, a lack of fulfillment. She examines the complexity of the relationship between a woman's roots, her efforts to create a unique life for herself, and how others become part of the self altogether. Josselson examines individual lives in depth for clues to understanding the strengths that help a woman to find fulfillment, and how a focus on raising the younger generation plays a role in creating this identity. With remarkable clarity and insight, Josselson challenges the common stereotypes of women, and shows how work, love, and care are all intertwined in a woman's feeling of identity.

Although questionnaires routinely ask people to check boxes indicating if they are, for example, male or female, black or white, Hispanic or American, many people do not fit neatly into one category or another. Identity is increasingly organized multiply and may encompass additional categories beyond those that appear on demographic questionnaires. In addition, identities are often fluid and context-dependent, depending on the external social factors that invite their emergence. Identity is constantly evolving in light of changing environments, but people are often uncomfortably fixed with societal labels that they must include or resist in their individual identity definition.
In our increasingly complex, globalized world, many people carry conflicting psychosocial identities. They live at the edges of more than one communal affiliation, with the challenge of bridging different loyalties and identifications. Navigating Multiple Identities considers those who are navigating across racial minority or majority status, various cultural expectations and values, gender identities, and roles. The chapters collected here by Josselson and Harway explore the ways in which individuals attain or maintain personal integration in the face of often shifting personal or social locations, and how they navigate the complexity of their multiple identities.