ABSTRACT
This chapter draws upon selected ideas from narrative psychology as a vehicle for exploring the process of psychological development, focusing especially on what is termed the ‘ethics of individuation’. Generally speaking, developmental theorizing entails the positing of a discrete endpoint, or telos, toward which the process of development progresses. From the perspective offered herein, the process of development may be better understood as entailing the reconstruction, or ‘rewriting’, of teloi, such that each new end may be considered an advance over the one previously posited. This process, which may be understood as comprising four distinct ‘moments’ of personal becoming – here named recognition, distanciation, articulation, and appropriation – is consonant with some central elements of Jung’s concept of individuation. By linking narrative knowing to the ethics of individuation via the developmental perspective being advanced, we have in hand a potentially valuable framework for understanding both the dynamics of personal growth and the inseparability of such growth from the moral and ethical dimensions of our lives and life stories.
