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Updated: Aug 15, 2026

Using Visual and Narrative Methods to Achieve Fair Process in Clinical Care
Published on: February 16, 2011
Transformative narratives: from victimic to agentic life plots
1Division of Counseling Psychology, School of Education, University of Southern California, Los Angeles 90089-0031, USA.
Abstract:
Basic to occupational engagement is a person's personal power to author choices. Impairment in functioning moves some clients from an agentic identity of self to a victimic identity. The change in identity causes previously self-directed clients to adopt a passive and acquiescent stance toward their lives. The recovery of occupational functioning includes the restoration of the person's sense of agency. Recent developments in self theory emphasize the self as a process rather than a substance or thing. Narrative is the discourse mode most able to express identity as a process. Victimic identity is manifest in a self-story in which protagonists have lost power to affect change in their lives; agentic identity is manifest in self-stories of active agency. A study of clients' rehabilitation by Cochran and Laub found that clients' change from victimic to agentic identity moves through four phases: incompleteness, positioning, actualizing, and completion.
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