Dan P. McAdams Libros

"The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump provides a coherent and nuanced psychological portrait of the 45th president of the United States. Drawing on biographical events in Trump's life and on contemporary research and theory in personality, social, and developmental psychology, the book explores the personality traits and psychological dynamics that have shaped Trump's life, with an emphasis on the strangeness of the case - how Trump again and again defies psychological expectations regarding what it means to be a human being. The book's central thesis is that Donald Trump is the episodic man. He lives in the moment, outside of time, without an internal story to connect the discrete scenes in his life. As such, Trump perceives himself to be more like a superhero or a primal force, supernatural and timeless, rather than a flesh-and-blood human being with an inner life, a remembered past, and an imagined future. Trump's psychological status as the episodic man helps us understand both Trump's appeal (in the minds of millions) and his failings. The book's interpretation of Trump sheds new light on Trump's charisma, his deal making, his volatile temperament, his approach to personal relationships, his narcissism, and his emergence as a new kind of authoritarian leader in American history."--

This book should be value for all those who are interested in enhancing their self-understanding. It should also serve as useful classroom text for undergraduates and advanced students in personality and social psychology, counselling and psychotherapy

Over the past several years psychology has begun to revise its vision of the self-contained individual, while devoting more attention to relational, ecological models of self. Evolving alongside this broader conceptualization of the self have been qualitative methods of studying the self-in-relationship. Building on their previous volumes in the Narrative Study of Lives series, editors Josselson, Lieblich, and McAdams illustrate the potential for narrative analysis to present new insights on human relationships. Here they present creative exemplars of studies on how relationships with parents, friends, peers, therapists, and even members of Internet communities affect such challenging human processes as acculturation, racial identity development, secure attachment, career choice, care giving, and grief. This volume will be of interest to those who seek a more complex understanding of the experience of relationship in human development. Therapists, researchers and students of developmental, personality and clinical psychology will find much in this book that will conceptually illuminate human relationship in context and in its many narratively-structured possibilities for meaning.