"This book is for anybody who has ever asked psychological questions like these: Who am I? How did I become the person I am today? My goal in this book is to tell a compelling story about personality development as it plays out in individual human lives across the human life course. It is a story that recognizes the artistry of individual lives while examining what contemporary science has to tell us about how human lives are psychologically patterned and how these patterns develop over time. I draw uponmany of the most illuminating studies and intriguing ideas in psychological science today to describe and explain the development of human personality over the life course. Reflecting the three central metaphors in my theory of personality development, the book is divided into three parts - Becoming the Social Actor, Becoming the Motivated Agent, and Becoming the Autobiographical Author. In the three sections, I move back and forth across the life span to sketch out a full psychological portrait of humanpersonality and trace its development from birth through old age"--