Watch: Highlights of Dan P. McAdams  |
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Dan P. McAdams addressed the campus community in Bayley Auditorium. |
SPRINGFIELD, Ohio – Funded by a gift from the IBM Corporation to Wittenberg University in 1982, the IBM Endowed Lecture in the Sciences aims to enhance the role and image of science on the liberal arts campus as it brings about a better understanding and appreciation of the sciences as crucial contemporary endeavors.
The first lecture of the 2006-07 Wittenberg Series, “The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By,” featured Dan P. McAdams, professor of psychology and professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University. A leader in social sciences’ recent emergence of narrative approaches to the study of human lives, McAdams latest book, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (Oxford University Press 2006), charts a new psychology of American identity as expressed in cultural and historical American texts and images, and in the life stories of caring and productive American adults in their midlife years.
Based on more than a decade of scientific research, McAdams places storytelling at the center of human personality. He believes that modern adults enhance their lives with a sense of unity and purpose by constructing and refining self-defining stories or "personal myths.”
McAdams put this notion into perspective in the context of Sept. 11, 2001, with a quote from journalist William Langewiesche. America's “response to 9/11 was unhesitant and almost childishly optimistic. It was understood that we would find the survivors, and then the dead and this would help the families," McAdams said. "This would allow New York City to make itself into something better than before.”
He introduced the idea of "generativity" or the concern for and commitment to the next generation. He praised generative people who have a vested interest in a positive image of the self for future generations, and he made the connection between generative people and "redemptive terms.”
“The more generative a person, the better stories they tell, then the more redemption that tends to be at the end of their stories," he explained. “I collect through both quantitative and qualitative data from a series of surveys from middle-aged adults. People can be generative at any age; however, generativity tends to be in a person's 50s, 60s and 70s.”
After taking questions from the audience, which included students, faculty and staff, and members of the Springfield community, McAdams called upon people to be more generative and introduced them to “talking the talk of redemption.”
“He really made the audience, regardless of age and generativity, examine their tendencies to put things into redemptive narratives," said Ryan Charles, class of 2008 from Mansfield, Ohio. "Maybe there isn’t redemption, maybe there is. I’ve never thought about how this applies to my own narratives.”
- Written By: Kimie James '07
- Photos By: Sean Wolf '07
- Video By: Ryan Charles '08
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