To make personality psychology personally involving, I developed an exercise based on imagoes, the characters that McAdams (1985, 1993) argued dominate life storks and personal myths. An imago is an idealized and personified self-concept we form in early or midadulthood. Broader than roles played in daily life, imagoes serve a unifying function: to make our stories and myths coherent. While keeping a journal, students identify individual myths and major life events, and then they write about the imagoes most frequently used to make sense out of their lives.
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