McAdams Honored With Lifetime Achievement Awards
We’re all authors, says Dan P. McAdams, creating meaning in our lives through stories.
Northwestern University psychologist Dan P. McAdams, who pioneered the study of lives, was honored with two lifetime achievement awards in recognition of his career-long impact on the field of psychology.
McAdams, the former interim dean at the School of Education and Social Policy and the Henry Wade Rogers Professor in the Department of Psychology, won the Constellation Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Also in 2024, he received the Distinguished Career Award from the International Society for the Science of Existential Psychology.
McAdams, a professor of human development and social policy, is the mind behind the psychology theory of narrative identity, which holds that human identity is organized as a story in one’s mind, including past, present and imagined future.
“If you could see an identity, it would look like a story,” he said. “The story would have characters, and it would talk about how you've developed over time, and you would use that story to explain to other people who you are.”
- Watch: Dan McAdams on Dispatches From the Well: How How Humanity Makes It’s Meaning
- Read: The Stories in Our Minds
McAdams first began developing his theory of narrative identity during his early years as a professor at Loyola University in Chicago in the 1980s. He taught a course which studied the work of famous psychologist Erik Erikson, who proposed that a key part of development in the teen years was struggling with creating and finding one’s identity.
“Students love this idea of identity,” McAdams said. “I would ask them in class, 'What is it? It sounds great, but what is this thing Erikson describes? ... If you could see this thing called an identity, what would it look like?' We tried all different kinds of things. We never really came up with a good answer in the class. But then a couple months afterwards, [the idea of a narrative] sort of occurred to me.”
Once he put his idea into the world, it wasn’t widely adopted until many years later.
“I tried to sell the concept in the field of personality,” he said. “It took a long time — almost a decade — to get any traction, but eventually it did take hold.”
Ever since, students and psychologists have been exploring and expanding on McAdams’ idea. Former student Henry Cowen, now an assistant professor at Michigan State University, took the idea of narrative identity into the realm of psychopathology: understanding and treating mental disorders. He also has done preliminary studies on the brain, exploring what happens in our brains when we think about our narrative identity or life story.
"I never would have gone that direction,” McAdams said. “I really wasn't interested in psychopathology, but now I am, because of him.”
Cowan, for his part, credits McAdam’s advising style for this exploration.
“If your advisor feels like you took their work to the next level, I mean, you really did it right,” Cowan said. “That speaks well to his mentorship -- he really gave me the independence to take his ideas and run with them in whatever ways that seemed most interesting to me.
"I learned so much from him about thinking about complex ideas, putting them together and then expressing them in clear language, which is something he has really mastered," Cowan added.
McAdams’ interest in psychology began on a philosophical level; as an undergraduate, he studied psychology at Valparaiso University in Indiana, near his hometown of Gary. There he encountered writings from Freud and other psychologists.
As his college graduation approached, he decided to apply to psychology graduate programs. He surprised himself by getting accepted to Harvard.
“To this day I don't really understand how I got in,” he said. “Although I was a good student, I'd never done research; I spent all my time reading Plato and Aristotle and Freud. They took a chance, and it was really lucky for me.”
At Harvard, McAdams realized that his time of reading and discussing the works of old psychologists was behind him. Harvard’s psychology department emphasized statistics and psychometrics, ideas that didn’t particularly interest McAdams, and during his first year, he considered dropping out to pursue law.
But he found an inspiring mentor in the late professor David McClelland, one of the eminent psychologists of the 20th century and an expert in human achievement and motivation.
“He had a certain kind of worldliness about him, yet he was deeply ethical and principled. He was a role model and once I started doing research with him, then it felt like 'oh, I've got a place here; I have a niche.'”
Working with McClelland gave McAdams the idea that perhaps he could pursue teaching psychology as a career. He finished his time at Harvard and then spent nine “fabulous” years teaching at Loyola University.
In 1989, intrigued by the interdisciplinary features of the School of Education and Social Policy, he replaced the “phenomenal legendary professor” Bernice Neugarten, who founded the nation’s first PhD program in Human Development and Social Policy.
Since then, McAdams has taught in both SESP and the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He also serves as the primary investigator and director of the Study of Lives Research Group. The group brings together graduate and undergraduate students across a wide range of disciplines at Northwestern around the common interest in the scientific study of human lives.
The Study of Lives is a successor to the Foley Center for the Study of Lives, a major research project funded by grants from the Foley Family Foundation of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
“I always thought of myself as partly a psychologist and partly other things because I always had these interests in the humanities and the other social sciences,” he said.
Meanwhile, his interest in lives extended to his students, Cowan said. In some of their meetings, they'd discuss baseball for 20 minutes (both are fans), before getting down to anything related to research. "“The day-to-day of working with him I found to be just incredibly fun and supportive,” Cowan said. “When I was struggling with something, I really felt comfortable talking with him about those things. That personal touch can get lost when we're talking about Dan McAdams as the intellectual, but that really made a huge difference in the day-to-day.”
The Strange Case of Donald Trump
In 2016, McAdams hit an unusual roadblock. He'd written about Donald Trump’s psyche for “The Atlantic” and knew Trump was not your average politician. He just couldn’t nail down why. Four years later, in his eighth book The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning, he provided some surprising answers. Trump, McAdams asserted, may be the rare person who lacks any inner story, something most people develop to give their lives unity, meaning and purpose.
Donald Trump is a “truly authentic fake,” McAdams wrote. "Trump is always acting, always on stage — but that is who he really is, and that is all he really is. He is not introspective, retrospective or prospective. He does not go deep into his mind; he does not travel back to the past; he does not project far into the future. He is always on the surface, always right now.
“In his own mind, he is more like a persona than a person, more like a primal force or superhero, rather than a fully realized human being,” McAdams added.
McAdams other books include the sixth edition of The Person: A New Introduction to Personality Psychology, in which he McAdams and his co-author — the late William Dunlop of the University of California, Riverside and Aarhus University in Denmark — explore a “more personal, more intellectually probing side of personality studies," McAdams said.
He also authored The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By, which integrates 15 years of research to map the psyches of extraordinarily caring and productive American adults. The book, a classic in the field, won the 2007 Association of American Publishers Award and the 2006 William James Award from the American Psychological Association.
McAdams’ two most recent awards for lifetime achievement join a long list of accolades that he has earned for his work over the years. The idea of narrative identity continues to grow and expand.
“It's been very rewarding,” he said. “I sometimes pinch myself to say, 'Is this actually really happening?' Because I spent so much time explaining the idea to people and getting a lot of quizzical looks... But now all these years later, narrative identity has actually made its mark on the psychology world.”