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How does an urban community garden serve as a site for the embodiment and extension of stories that people can tell about their identities? How does work in the garden foster new forms of identity negotiation and dialogue both within and between gardeners, and thereby enable desired individual and collection transformation? In the spotlight is Helen, a single, middle-aged white woman gardener, but the garden is a crowded space. Her identity narratives are understood through other gardeners’ narratives, and in light of proximal and distal contexts. Evidence was collected through unstructured phenomenological interviews and life histories coupled with engaged, participant observation and archival research. It was analyzed through the lenses of an existentially, morally, and hermeneutically attuned dialogical self theory. Through her experiences of who she is in and through the garden, Helen enjoys what she narrates as more satisfying and productive dialogues between her identities, with healthier forms of self at the center of her attention, while she holds distressing identities in the background. The community garden provides the material, interpersonal, and aesthetic resources for the creation of new kinds of identity dialogues within Helen and between her and other gardeners. How the writing of this research might enhance that promise is considered. Implications for a general theory of multiple identity negotiation include the call for more attention to personality and social structure approaches and the importance of place in studies of identity, and a warning about the dangers of categories in identity research.

A detailed reading of Obama’s autobiographical Dreams from my Father is conducted to illuminate psychological understanding of the challenges of multiple identity, challenges that occur at both deeply emotional as well as cognitive levels of experience. The aim is to extend conceptualization of the space between psychic reality and socially constructed discourses. This chapter assesses the various impacts of internal psychological forces and social pressures and considers how they interrelate. One’s sense of identity may have different meanings as the context of relationality changes, and the change in context can modify internal, felt awareness of who one “is.” Writing retrospectively in his early thirties, Obama details the interconnection between his internal psychic reality, rooted in relationships of love, and the various social constructions of raciality that he encountered. My psychological analysis posits that Obama writes from a stance of a subjective, nonracialized self about his creation of a personal racial identity. Concepts of intersubjectivity, identificatory love, and “overinclusiveness,” drawn from relational psychoanalysis as well as Erikson’s writings on identity, are utilized to theorize how discontinuous self-organizations may be held in dialectical tension. This chapter argues for the need to conceptualize identity in dynamic terms, as a structure or structures that hold together multiple versions of the internal and the discursive.

The introduction presents the two-fold purpose of this book: (a) to demonstrate that the self is not determined by society as an outside cause but shaping society in its own self-organization and (b) to investigate the extent to which the self is democratically organized. The presented positioning theory provides an alternative to both Antony Greenwald’s totalitarian ego and Marvin Minsky’s depiction of the self as a bureaucratic organization. As an analogy to Amartya’s conception of democracy as a societal learning process, the democratic self is described as an internal learning process in which parts of the self (so-called I-positions) are continuously organized and reorganized in fields of tension between dialogue and social power. The presented theory is characterized as a “bridging theory” that explores the links between theories from different disciplines with the intention to develop a theory of a self that is continuously involved in processes of positioning, counter-positioning, and repositioning. The content of the 8 chapters of the book are summarized.

Chapter 2 discusses how the experience of exile comes to shape identity in a way that can be at odds with the collective identity of that person’s exiled group. The author draws on his fieldwork to show instances in the informants’ narratives where their sense of exile did not cohere to other Tibetans’ experiences of exile, resulting in a double alienation. The author also looks to the narratives of the informants to identify a salient type of story they told, one that combines surrender, apartness, and survival. Finally, the author identifies the modes through salient stories that were told and situates these understandings within narrative psychological literature about identity, pointing to both the possibilities and limits of the concept.