ABSTRACT
Psychology is notorious for its failure to come to grips with what many regard as its primary subject matter—i.e, persons and their lives. In its desire to be considered a natural science, psychology has repeatedly fallen into traps of reductive individualism and mentalism that limit and restrict its ability to speak directly to people in the contexts of their everyday lives. In this chapter, I conceptualize persons and propose an ontology of persons and their lives that avoids these difficulties. The basic strategy is to theorize person agents in their life contexts as psychology’s primary ontological units, to describe how the capabilities that constitute their personhood and agency arise through their interactivity with others within the contexts and courses of their lives, and to give examples of methods of “life writing” appropriate to studying persons and their life experiences.
