A New Narrative for Psychology is a far-reaching book that seeks to reorient how scholars and laypersons study and think about persons and the goals of psychological understanding. The book provides a challenging critique of contemporary variable-centered, statistical methods, revealing what these approaches to psychological research leave unexplored; it presents readers with a cutting-edge, narrative, approach for getting at the thorny problem of meaning making in human lives. For readers unfamiliar with narrative psychology, this is an excellent first text, which considers the history of nar ... More

A New Narrative for Psychology is a far-reaching book that seeks to reorient how scholars and laypersons study and think about persons and the goals of psychological understanding. The book provides a challenging critique of contemporary variable-centered, statistical methods, revealing what these approaches to psychological research leave unexplored; it presents readers with a cutting-edge, narrative, approach for getting at the thorny problem of meaning making in human lives. For readers unfamiliar with narrative psychology, this is an excellent first text, which considers the history of narrative psychology and its place in contemporary psychology. The book goes well beyond the basics, however. A New Narrative for Psychology offers a fresh and innovative theoretical perspective on narrative as an active interpretive process that is implicated in most aspects of everyday life, and the ways in which narrative functions to make present and real subjective and inter-subjective experiences. Theory is grounded in vivid illustrations of what can be learned from the intensive study of how persons, in time and space, narrate their experiences, selves, social relationships, and the world. A New Narrative for Psychology reintroduces narrative psychology as a credible, trustworthy, and useful perspective for considering the hows and whys of human meaning making and argues for the necessity of narrative as a central, and complementary, perspective in scientific psychology. It is an invitation to a conversation about the critical questions of psychology, the most effective strategies for approaching them, and the future of discipline.