The transformative self : personal growth, narrative identity, and the good life / Jack Bauer.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The Transformative Self explores three of life's perennial questions: How do we make sense of our lives? What is a good life? How do we create one? In this comprehensive volume, developmental psychologist Jack Bauer responds to those three questions by integrating three main areas of study-narrative identity, the good life, and personal growth-to present an innovative model of humane flourishing and human development. The Transformative Self synthesizes an extensive range of scholarship, from scientific research in psychology to work in philosophy, literature, history, cultural studies, and more. The result is a cohesive framework for understanding how personal and cultural stories shape our development and how, through those stories, we might cultivate the growth of happiness, love, and wisdom for the self and others.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Section I The Transformative Self as a Good Life Story
• 1 Introducing the Transformative Self (p. 3)
• Cultivating growth. What a transformative self is not. What a transformative self is: a largely narrative self-identity that features personal growth toward a good life. Why narrative? Life stories and cultural master narratives. What is a good life? Merging theories of the good life with theories of narrative identity. A transformative self aims to cultivate a good life. How to use this book.
• 2 The Cultural Master Narrative of Personal Growth (p. 32)
• Growth has long been a wildly popular ideal. The Axial Age. The Western ideal of progress. The bildungsroman genre as cultural master narrative of personal growth. The Razor's Edge and Lives of Girls and Women, for example. The nature of personal growth. Personal growth here is not individualistic. Well-roundedness versus specialization.
• 3 Growth and the Good Life (p. 57)
• Larry's pleasure. Hedonia as pleasure (and satisfaction), period. Pleasure as a necessary but not sufficient candidate good in life. Eudaimonia as meaning (in all its varieties), period. Value at the nexus of pleasure and meaning. Value orientation, value fulfillment, and value perspectivity. Value orientations of eudaimonic growth, personified by characters in The Razor's Edge. Criticisms of eudaimonic theories. Euvitalic personhood. The inside/outside framework of all measures of goods in life. Four umbrella goods in life: happiness, love, wisdom, and growth.
• 4 Growth and a Good Life Story (p. 100)
• The idea of growth. Growthiness. Growth, time, and narrative. Chronological time versus personal time. Change versus development. Eudaimonic growth values and their actualizations. Metaphors of growth. Growth in a narrative self-identity. Narrative content (e.g., tones and themes) and narrative structure. Studying life stories. A good life-story and a good-life story. The transformative self as a good life story.
• 5 Growthy Tones in Personal Narratives (p. 133)
• Narrative tone conveys affect and satisfaction. Tones and hedonic growthiness. Tone as global positivity and negativity. The optimal positive-to-negative ratio. Realistic optimism. Approaching and avoiding life. Growthy gains: positive affective sequences of gain, redemption, recovery, and self-improvement as hedonic value fulfillments. The redemptive self versus redemption sequences. Growthy goals. Narrative tone and adjustment to life. On interpretation.
• 6 Growth Themes in Personal Narratives (p. 159)
• Whereas tone conveys whether an event is good, theme conveys why. Life's three great themes: agency, communion, and growth. Growth themes as the heart of the transformative self. What growth sounds like. What growth does not sound like. Reflective and experiential growth themes. Agentic and communal growth themes. Growth themes and growth actualization. Growth themes convey a value orientation of growth; growthy tones convey whether those values are fulfilled. Growth themes versus growthy tones in research. Growth themes link actions, motivations, and mechanisms of development.
• 7 Growth Structure in Personal Narratives (p. 193)
• Structure versus content. Narrative structure as value perspectivity. Value perspectivity versus value orientation and value fulfillment in narratives. Integrative complexity. Sounds like structure but it is content: closure, many forms of coherence, continuity over time, and affective sequences. Narrative positioning. Narrative structure and the transformative self. Wisdom, narrative structure, and maturity. Summing up Section I.
• Section II The Person Who has a Transformative Self
• 8 Transformative Traits, Motives, and Experiences (p. 229)
• Personality as routine functioning. Three levels of personality. Growth stories and traits: openness, extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and honesty/humility. Growth motivation as a desire to foster personal growth. Reflective and experiential growth motivation. Humanistic value orientations. Concerns for generativity. Values, moral reasoning, politics, and growth motivation. Transformative emotions and experiences: empathy, compassion, gratitude, awe, elevation, flow, savoring, and mindfulness.
• 9 Transformative Self-Regulation and the Quiet Ego (p. 263)
• The transformative self as adaptive agent. Macro-level self-regulation toward lifelong growth in happiness, love, and wisdom. Action identification and levels of personhood. Growthy, hedonic self-regulation: self-improvement motivation, cybernetic feedback processes, intentional self-development, and the flexible pursuit of goals. Models of transformative self-regulation and dual-process models of adaptation to difficult life events. The quiet ego as ideal self-regulator toward eudaimonic growth.
• 10 Growth in the Hard and Soft Margins of Society (p. 286)
• Marginality and narrative. Hard and soft marginality. Marginality and cultural master narratives. The hard margins, unfreedoms, and hindrances to eudaimonic growth. Basic needs and poverty. Race and ethnicity. Sexual and gender identity. Women (and men). The soft margins and eudaimonic growth of bildungsroman protagonists. Two cultural master narratives of progress: upward mobility versus personal growth, and then in stories of racial marginality and Invisible Man.
• Section III The Development of the Transformative Self
• 11 Nature, Nurture, and 'Ndividuality: Why Personal Growth Is Possible (p. 329)
• The great spell and paradox of American developmental psychology: The person's lack of agency in the nature-and-nurture model. 'Ndividuality as a third causal force of human development. The realness of epiphenomena. Emergence in organismic systems. Pluralist epiphenomena, organismic systems, and the social ecology. 'Ndividuality as a self-organizing, organismic system. The apersonal illusion.
• 12 The Transforming, Transformative Self: Identity Development (p. 351)
• The transformative self develops. Identity development in a psychosocial ecology. Eudaimonic growth as the Eriksonian ideal. Exploration, commitment, and an updated identity status paradigm. Searchers, traditionalists, pathmakers, and drifters. Identity statuses in The Razors Edge and Lives of Girls and Women. Research on non-idealized pathways of identity statuses. Identity statuses as personality characteristics. Exploration is not a lack of commitment.
• 13 The Aging, Transformative Self: Growth Is Not Just for the Young (p. 381)
• Debunking a popular belief about growth and aging. Growth is not just for the young, says research. Growth goals, growth memories, and the aging self. Growth is not a Pollyanna concept. Young growth, mature growth. Identity, intimacy, and generativity by stage and age. Mature growth as narrative depth.
• 14 Stages of Transformative S elf-Authorship (p. 401)
• Development of narrative structure, not content. Some principles: Piaget, Loevinger, stages as routine capabilities, stages and ages, subject becomes object, stages possess us. Self-authorship and transformative self-authorship. Stages of transformative self-authorship: Pre-Authorship, Impulsive, Egoist, Groupish, Independent, Constructivist, Organismic, Dynamic, and Integrative.
• Section IV Shadows and Illumination
• 15 The Dark Side of the Transformative Self (p. 449)
• The dark side of growth. The Growth Nazi. Perfectionism is typical of a transformative self. Adaptive versus maladaptive perfectionism. Eudaimonic materialism as a lack of humanistic concern. Wanting moral status. Publish or perish. Overcommitment and wanting it all. Women, work, and family. A destructive ideal. Undercommitment and ceaseless seeking. A never-ending search for meaning. "Let not him who seeks cease until he finds." The search for the true self. Shedding light on the dark side of growth.
• 16 Authenticity, Self-Actualizing, and S elf-Author ship (p. 492)
• Authenticity: true to your traits or to your values? Essentialist versus existentialist authenticity. Self-discovery and self-invention. Ethics and psychological realism. Stories: real or fake? The matching principle and the poiesis principle of authenticity. Youthful versus mature authenticity. Authenticity, perspectivity, and structural development. Self-actualizing: what it is not and why it matters. Expertise in self-understanding. Self-actualizing and the structural development of self-authorship. Reframing Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
• 17 The Self Beyond the Story (p. 533)
• Must a story be linguistic? Must the self be storied? Living in the moment: Experiential growth beyond words. Transcendent insight: reflective growth beyond words. The problem of scriptedness. The transformative self leads the person toward experiential and reflective growth both with words and beyond them.

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