The brief, practical texts in the Essentials of Qualitative Methods series introduce social science and psychology researchers to key approaches to qualitative methods, offering exciting opportunities to gather in-depth qualitative data and to develop rich and useful findings.

In this book, Ruthellen Josselson and Phillip L. Hammack introduce readers to Narrative Analysis, a qualitative method that investigates how people make meaning of their lives and experiences in both social and cultural contexts. This method offers researchers a window into how individuals' stories are shaped by the categories they inhabit, such as gender, race, class, and sexual identity, and it preserves the voice of the individual through a close textual analysis of their storytelling.

About the Essentials of Qualitative Methods book series: Even for experienced researchers, selecting and correctly applying the right method can be challenging. In this groundbreaking series, leading experts in qualitative methods provide clear, crisp, and comprehensive descriptions of their approach, including its methodological integrity, and its benefits and limitations. Each book includes numerous examples to enable readers to quickly and thoroughly grasp how to leverage these valuable methods.

Irvin Yalom is one of the best known, most widely-read and most influential psychiatrists in the contemporary world. Through his many books, which are accessible to ordinary readers as well as illuminating for psychotherapists, he has provided a guide for living in a perplexing world. A recent poll of American psychotherapists voted him to be one of the three most important living therapists, but the worldwide success of his books suggests that his prominence is international Rather than positioning himself as a representative of one of the hundreds of schools or approaches to psychotherapy, Yalom offers a message that goes to the heart of psychotherapy. Taking up the central existential concerns of human life, Yalom's work engages the problems of finding meaning in life and confronting death, concerns that had lain beyond the scope of psychiatry. Writing in a literary style that reviewers have compared to Freud, Yalom details what actually happens in the intimate human encounter that is psychotherapy. Yalom does not shrink from exposing his own thoughts and feelings about what occurs; he, too, is a vulnerable and searching human being. He makes his thinking about his patients, and his efforts to treat them, transparent, exposing his doubts, reservations and struggles as well as his insights. He has written two textbooks, two volumes of case history stories, three novels about therapy, a guide for therapists and one book of counsel for the masses confronting death. Across all of this work, he explores the limitless and complex possibilities of the healing inherent in genuine human connection and authentic awareness of the dilemmas of human existence. This book Irvin Yalom: On Psychotherapy and the Human Condition traces the genesis and evolution of his thinking and presents some of the seminal ideas of his writings. AUTHOR: Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D. is a Professor of Psychology at The Fielding Graduate University and was formerly a Professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Harvard University. She is the author of Playing Pygmalion: How People Create One Another; Revising Herself: The Story of Women's Identity from College to Midlife and The Space Between Us: Exploring the Dimensions of Human Relationships. She has been, for many years, Co-editor of the Annual, The Narrative Study of Lives. Recipient of the Henry A. Murray Award from the American Psychological Association and a Fulbright Fellowship, she is also a practicing psychotherapist and holds a diplomate in Group Psychotherapy.

Irvin Yalom es uno de los psiquiatras m s famosos, le dos, e influyentes del mundo contempor neo. A trav s de sus numerosos libros, accesibles por igual al lector no especializado y esclarecedores para los psicoterapeutas, ofrece una gu a de vida para manejarnos en un mundo que nos desconcierta. Una reciente encuesta realizada en los Estados Unidos lo coloc entre uno de los tres psicoterapeutas vivos m s eminentes, aunque el xito mundial alcanzado por sus libros indica que su importancia trasciende las fronteras. Antes que tomar posici n como representante de uno de los centenares de 'escuelas' o m todos psicoterap uticos, Yalom transmite un mensaje que toca directamente el coraz n de la psicoterapia. Abordando los temas centrales de la problem tica existencial que angustia al hombre, su obra se dirige a encontrar el sentido de la vida y a enfrentar la muerte, dos cuestiones excluidas de la psiquiatr a hasta que Yalom las trajo a su campo. Con un estilo literario que los cr ticos parangonaron con el de Freud, Yalom detalla la realidad del encuentro ntimo en el que consiste la psicoterapia. No evade el expresar lo que piensa y siente acerca de lo que all ocurre: tambi n l es un ser humano vulnerable en busca de respuestas. Todo es transparente en lo que piensa sobre sus pacientes y los esfuerzos que realiza para tratarlos. Expone sus dudas, reservas, y luchas as como sus insights. Es autor de dos libros de texto, dos vol menes de historiales, tres novelas centradas sobre la terapia, una gu a para terapeutas, y un libro de consejos para los muchos que se enfrentan a la muerte. La totalidad de su obra explora las posibilidades complejas e ilimitadas de la cura apoyada en la genuina conexi n humana y la aut ntica conciencia de los dilemas planteados por la existencia. Irvin D. Yalom: De la psicoterapia y la condici n humana delinea la g nesis y la evoluci n de su pensamiento, y presenta algunas de las ideas seminales desarrolladas en sus escritos. RUTHELLEN JOSSELSON Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D., es Profesora de Psicolog a en la Fielding Graduate University, y ex profesora de la Universidad Hebrea de Jerusalem y de la Universidad de Harvard. Es autora de Playing Pygmalion: How People Create One Another; de Revisiting Herself: The Story of Women's Identity from College to Midlife, y de The Space Between Us: Exploring the Dimensions of Human Relationships. Durante muchos a os codirigi la publicaci n anual titulada The Narrative Study of Lives. Fue galardonada con el premio Henry A. Murray otorgado por la American Psychological Association, y fue merecedora de una beca Fullbright. Ejerce la psicoterapia, y es diplomada en Psicoterapia de Grupo. ++++ De la psicoterapia y la condici n humana es como Yalom mismo: l cido, abierto, y sabio. Al tiempo que describe el arte y el fondo de la psicoterapia, nos ofrece un buen relato acerca de un gran narrador. -Dr. David Spiegel, M.D. Titular asociado de la c tedra de Psiquiatr a y Ciencias de la Conducta de la Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad de Stanford. Yalom . en sus]. dos novelas inspiradas en fil sofos reales (Nietzsche y Schopenauer), transformados en casos cl nicos..presenta a los hombres en su integridad vital, delineando al mismo tiempo la estructura ntima de su ser. - Dr. N stor A. Braunstein. Catedr tico en la Facultad de Filosof a y Letras de la UNAM. Doctor en Medicina con especializaci n en Psiquiatr a. Autor de numerosas publicaciones.

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.

How do we derive concepts from stories and then use these concepts to understand people? What would have to be added to transform story material from the journalistic or literary to the academic and theoretically enriching? Addressing these and other issues such as the interface between life as lived and the social times, distinguished contributors explore this emerging new field in this unique volume.

Beginning with the philosophical framework that underlies the study of narrative, the book covers such questions as: what makes people want to preserve the stories of their past? What methods can be used to deconstruct a narrative text? Can what we learn from people′s narratives of their past be used to account for their curr

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 simpl

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, which challenged as never before the traditional role models of earlier generations. 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.
With stunning candor and hard-won insight, the ordinary (and anonymous) women in Josselson's study reveal how much more complex and interesting real women's lives are than the one-dimensional stereotypes often portrayed in the media. Dismissing a traditional stage theory of development as overly simplistic, Josselson identifies four trajectories that women take from adolescence to adulthood. Guardians are the good girls--high achieving and committed to fulfilling their family's expectations, but rigid in outlook and resistant to change. Pathmakers are not afraid of risk or commitment, striving to balance their own needs with others'. The often idealistic Searchers are overwhelmed by choice and unable to make commitments, while Drifters live only for the moment, avoiding choice and an exploration of identity. Reflecting the degree to which women take risks, make choices, and form commitments, these paths form a foundation for adulthood--but they also lead to surprises: at midlife, Guardians seem strikingly able to cut loose from earlier traditional patterns, while many Drifters have found themselves, sometimes in quite traditional ways. And coming of age just as the feminist movement gathered momentum, the women in Josselson's study were the first to confront many contemporary issues not faced by their mothers, or their mothers' mothers: How does an Irish Catholic contemplate an abortion? How does a woman whose parents believe education is wasted on a daughter find the will to apply to medical school? In examining these questions and others, Josselson shows that the forging of a woman's identity--whatever her path--is ongoing, a balancing of the need for self-assertion against the equally compelling need for relationships. Women create their identities along the seams of both competence and connection and continually revise what they have made.
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. Whether a Guardian, Pathmaker, Searcher, or Drifter, readers will recognize themselves in these women's experiences and gain new insight into how we construct our identities over a lifetime.

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 25 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 by taking up meaningful roles in the work world. These real women, in contrast to the 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 identity. Josselson examines individual lives in depth for clues to understanding the strengths that help a woman to find fulfillment, and how in generativity becomes an anchor for meaningful identity as lives unfold.

With remarkable clarity and insight, Josselson challenges simplistic generalizations about women, and shows how work, love, and care are all intertwined in a woman's sense of identity.

We create the characters that people our lives. Although others appear to us to be who they just 'are', there are complicated unconscious psychological processes that lead us to experience people in ways that we ourselves construct. This book analyzes how four pairs of people, central in each other's lives, 'create' one another. It demonstrates how each of us is like a theater director, casting others into roles on our stage, even as others are casting us into their dramas.

The focus of this book is on the role of narrative analysis in the social sciences and in increasing our understanding of human lives and experiences. Contributors address such questions as: Should in-depth interviews become occasions in which to ask for life stories so as to enhance a study of social phenomena? Can a richer approach to psychological understanding be reached by studying how experience, conscious and unconscious, is organized, interpreted and reshaped throughout the life cycle? How can biographical work be used to shed light on the social construction of individual lives?

In addition, the book covers the use of narrative analysis in career biography, in examining turning points in people′s lives, in the effe

How does a narrative serve as a way to uncover and construct a person′s identity? How do life and life-story influence each other? Addressing these and other issues related to the place of narratives in understanding human lives, this volume focuses on identity and gender.

Chapters explore 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 change as they move into adolescence.

The focus of this book is on the role of narrative analysis in the social sciences and in increasing our understanding of human lives and experiences. Contributors address such questions as: Should in-depth interviews become occasions in which to ask for life stories so as to enhance a study of social phenomena? Can a richer approach to psychological understanding be reached by studying how experience, conscious and unconscious, is organized, interpreted and reshaped throughout the life cycle? How can biographical work be used to shed light on the social construction of individual lives?

In addition, the book covers the use of narrative analysis in career biography, in examining turning points in people's lives, in the effe

From the premise that knowledge is co-constructed by observer and observed, and both must be clearly visible in research reports, Conversation as Method explores a rich methodology evolving from people coming together to talk, listen and learn from one another.

The book consists of an engaging discussion among four women, all feminist scholars, who explore different ways of knowing. The quantitative orientation of one combined with the qualitative methodology of the other three makes for a stimulating and exchange on how growing up communally affects relationships later on in life. Readers are also encouraged to participate in the conversation by making their own individual assessments of interpretations each author

Integrating psychological theories with empirical evidence, the author of this volume draws fundamental conclusions about the nature and types of relationships, and develops eight dimensions of relatedness ranging from the very casual to the deeply intimate.

Each chapter examines a particular dimension and includes a brief life history of a person interviewed by the author. Particular attention is paid to how the type of relationship discussed shaped that person, with diagrams charting these relationships over time. The book also discusses how the sexes differ in the way they relate to others and the various forms that love can take.

The sixth volume in this series provides: guides for doing qualitative research; analysis of several autobiographies; hints on how to interpret what is not said in narrative interviews; discussion on how cultural meanings and values are transmitted across generations; and illustrations of the transformational power of stories.

First-hand accounts of the ideological, moral, emotional and practical complexities that surround the doing of narrative research are offered in this volume.

Exploring such issues as: whether work that risks exposing sensitive aspects of peoples′ lives can ever be fully ethical; what effect being written about has on people; the line between narrative research and psychotherapy; and the after-effects of this research on the researcher, the contributions reveal the struggles and anxieties that narrative researchers face.

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.

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.