IDENTIFYING IMAGOES - A PERSONALITY EXERCISE ON MYTH, SELF, AND IDENTITY

To make Personality psychology personally involving, I developed an ex ercise based on imagoes, the characters that McAdams (1985, 1993) argu ed dominate life stories and personal myths. An image is an idealized and personified self-concept sue form in early or midadulthood. Broade r than roles played in daily life, imagoes serve a unifying function: to make our stories and myths coherent. While keeping a journal, stude nts identify individual myths and major life events, and then they wri te about the imagoes most frequently used to make sense out of their l ives.