The Transformative Self Personal Growth, Narrative Identity, and the Good Life

The Transformative Self explores three of life's perennial questions: How do we make sense of our lives? What is a good life? How do we create one?

In this comprehensive volume, developmental psychologist Jack J. Bauer responds to those three questions by integrating three main areas of study-narrative identity, the good life, and personal growth-to present an innovative model of humane flourishing and human development.

The Transformative Self synthesizes an extensive range of scholarship, from scientific research in psychology to work in philosophy, literature, history, cultural studies, and more. The result is a cohesive framework for understanding how personal and cultural stories shape our development and how, through those stories, we might cultivate the growth of happiness, love, and wisdom for the self and others.

Jack Bauer is Professor of Psychology and past Raymond A. Roesch, S.M., Endowed Chair in the Social Sciences at the University of Dayton. He is co-editor of the book Transcending Self-Interest: Psychological Explorations of the Quiet Ego and is a leading scholar of narrative identity, growth motivation, and eudaimonia, or human flourishing. He was associate editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the editor of a local newspaper in northern Michigan. He currently serves as associate editor at the Journal of Happiness Studies.