Narrative Identity and Personality Disorder: an Empirical and Conceptual Review

Identity is one of the key domains that is disturbed in people manifesting personality disorder (PD). Within the field of personality psychology, there is a robust approach to studying identity focused on narrative identity which has been largely overlooked in studying PD. In this paper, a systematic review was conducted of studies published in the past decade that focused on how individuals manifesting personality pathology craft their narrative identity.

This review revealed disturbances related to several motivational/affective themes (e.g., negative valence/valence shifts and thwarted themes of agency and communion), autobiographical reasoning (negative self-inferences), and structural elements (e.g., low coherence and fewer life script events) within the narrative identity of people who manifest PD. Narrative identity is disturbed in people experiencing personality pathology and may have crucial implications for enhancing our conceptual understanding of PD and for PD interventions. This review also points to several research limitations and gaps that we encourage the field to pursue in the future.