0.1 Culture and personality  (Page 14/16)

When considering the life of an individual like Shawn Withers, the son of a Maine fisherman, who suffered a massive stroke at the age of 20, but then went on to earn a black belt in Kenpo Karate and then developed his own style known as Broken Wing Kenpo (Withers, 2007), broad descriptions of personality theory and cultural perspectives fall short of giving us an understanding of the person. Thus, some researchers, like Dan McAdams (McAdams, 1985, 2006; McAdams et al., 2001), have emphasized the need for studying a narrative framework within which we not only live our lives, but actually create them:

…like stories in literature, the stories we tell ourselves in order to live bring together diverse elements into an integrated whole, organizing the multiple and conflicting facets of our lives within a narrative framework which connects past, present, and an anticipated future and confers upon our lives a sense of sameness and continuity - indeed, an identity . As the story evolves and our identity takes form, we come to live the story as we write it, assimilating our daily experience to a schema of self that is a product of that experience. (pg. v; McAdams, 1985)

Although this textbook will cover broad personality theories and cultural perspectives, there are also reflective elements and discussion questions included to help you try to address your own narrative stories. In addition, there are biographies at the beginning of each chapter on the major theorists, which although they are not personal narratives, will nonetheless give some insight into the sort of person that theorist was, and hopefully, how their life and their personal experiences helped to shaped the personality theory they developed.

Culture and Mental Illness

Although this book focuses on normal personality development, one cannot escape the fact that most of the famous personality theorists were clinicians who were trying to understand how their patients/clients had developed psychological disorders. So, our understanding of personality development grew hand-in-hand with our understanding of psychological disorders. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders began addressing the importance of culture in the 4 ^th edition, and more recently it has taken a dramatic step forward with the publication of the DSM's 5 ^th edition (American Psychiatric Association, 2000, 2013).

The DSM-V includes a section on Emerging Measures and Models , one chapter of which is called Cultural Formulation . Although the DSM-IV began to present an outline for cultural formulation, the DSM-V includes two valuable sets of questions that have been field-tested to help clinicians assess the cultural identity of a patient/client and how that cultural identity may affect the diagnosis and treatment of any potential psychological disorder. The first set of questions is the basis for the Cultural Formulation Interview, and the second set comprise the Cultural Formulation Interview - Informant Version (which is given to someone who is knowledgeable about the life circumstances and potential clinical problems of the patient/client).