A profound interest in meaning-making and transformation has persisted across multiple generations of humanistic psychologists in their efforts to frame their understandings of human experience. This interest in the process of making meaning and perceiving the self has invited the integration of multiple psychological categories including personality, narrative, developmental, and depth psychologies, among others—all with a humanistic flavor. Over the past 10 years, Oxford University Press has published nearly 20 volumes in an important series titled Explorations in Narrative Psychology (Mark Freeman, series editor). In 2021, Jack Bauer’s book, The Transformative Self: Personal Growth, Narrative Identity, and the Good Life, presented a model of human development and flourishing that arose from decades of thought and research about some of life’s most important questions. In an interview during spring 2025, we were fortunate to be able to explore some of his thoughts about the book and about humanistic psychology and its current place in the world.
It’s such a privilege to talk with you about this book and really about all your work, which crosses several categories like narrative, developmental, and others. I suppose my first inquiry would be about whether you identify as a particular kind of psychologist.
I suppose one way is as a generalist. I’m definitely a developmentalist, trained in the Piagetian tradition and in an Eriksonian approach to human development. I did post-doc work in personality with Dan McAdams in an interdisciplinary graduate program. That was wonderful for me because I don’t view the world simply through the lens of psych. I mean, psychology is primary, but it’s also philosophy; it’s literature; it’s history; it’s cultural studies; it’s world religions… So, yes, I study personality development and it’s humanistic. That’s more than a thread—it pervades the whole idea. I’ve been trying to study all that using largely scientific methods, studying humanistic concerns of meaning-making while living in a world of others, or really an ever-emerging, interdependent world of self-and-others. It’s exciting to have my foot in the door of humanistic psychology because that’s always where my heart was. I remember I was flying in a plane from Chicago to Denver when I was 23 or 24, and I read a specific line in Toward a Psychology of Being where Maslow said we address every moment of life in the direction of either growth or safety. And I’ve been studying that basic idea ever since, in all kinds of ways, particularly through the lens of identity development.
I’m curious about the development of the book and your hopes for it. Did you see it as a textbook?
No, not really a textbook, although I do use it in a senior capstone seminar, where students have written some really insightful things based on it. What I would really like for it is to have some kind of impact on psychology, helping to move the field toward a deeper view of personhood. Maybe a deeper relationality, a deeper interiority, deeper temporality over time. A more dynamic, organismic view of personhood as a system among other systems and within systems… That is very difficult to study scientifically. I think humanistic psychologists think like that naturally, but I’ve been trying to convince the science of psychology of this kind of thing.
A lot of my narrative colleagues are interested in the narration itself, in the stories. I’m interested in stories primarily as a vehicle for meaning making. The stories are where we get meaning; where we conclude that we’re happy or that we have love. It’s where we organize our worlds in ways that others might consider wise or not. So, the way I study narrative is to deconstruct it and look at the narrative architecture. How does narrative meaning making work at an elemental level? And then, building up from that, how we create a narrative identity—which is what most of my close colleagues are interested in—along with appraisals of human flourishing.
Would it be accurate to say that the first half of the book is about the narrative architecture of identity and flourishing, and the latter half of the book is about the process of transformation?
The first part is about the mechanisms and dynamics of narrative meaning-making and the good life. It maps out that terrain and presents an organizing framework of valuing, called Value Orientation and Actualization. That framework allows for what I call the narrative architecture of identity and flourishing. At the heart of a transformative self are narrative themes of humanistic growth. The idea here is to give a template of what growth sounds like in its myriad forms. And then we might ask, Growth toward what? Toward humanistic conceptions of a good life—toward happiness, love, and wisdom. The book presents a comprehensive framework for mapping out models of a good life, like hedonia and eudaimonia, which I argue are perfectly compatible but operate on different levels of contextuality.
Then the next part of the book is about what facilitates or hinders the cultivation of a transformative self. The transformative self is not a person. It’s a mental model of how we view ourselves and others, a model of personhood. The rest of the book explores the person who has a transformative self—what their personality is like and what their social environment is like. Our individual personal stories don’t just arise out of thin air. Cultural master narratives play a big role. Our cultural master narratives are how we learn what’s good within our culture, but also, they can be rigid and disenfranchising and exacerbating of different prejudices. I’m really interested in the idea that a humanistic value orientation could be at once liberating, but hegemonic, too. I’ve struggled a lot to try to figure this out and I’ve come to view the Bildungsroman genre of literature as an illustration of a master narrative of humanistic personal growth. And like other cultural master narratives, it’s a luxury to be able to live it out. It demands material and social resources that are often systematically denied to what I call the hard margins of society. Some people, just owing to the categories or intersectionalities they have, are going to face more obstacles to or fewer resources for living out the freedoms they are promised by the cultural master narratives.
Is everyone, or everyone potentially, a transformative-self type of person?
To some degree, we all have a transformative self, and to some degree not. But some people have self-identities that are really rooted in cultivating the kinds of activities and relationships that foster humanistic growth. We’re not born showing mature forms of love or wisdom. These things must develop.
Many of our readers are psychotherapists, clearly interested in self-growth and transformation. Can we foster the development of self-growth?
I think about this all the time, and on some days, most days, I think you can teach something about it. But here’s a way not to do it. A way not to do it is to tell someone, or even tell yourself, that you’ve got to grow. The transformative self means something that initiates growth, or that evokes or creates growth. It’s a mental model of oneself that facilitates the development of the person who has that self. It’s not some onerous push for self-improvement all the time, a call for every situation to be a growth opportunity. That’s a kind of perfectionism that I talk about in Section Four of the book on the dark side of growth—things like perfectionism, moralism, trying to have it all, and what I call ceaseless seeking without finding. Then there are I think some really unique chapters on authenticity and self-actualizing and transcending the linguistic self of narrative identity. The power of a transformative self is that it pitches oneself into experientially engaging activities and experientially meaningful relationships. We all catch ourselves doing things for reasons of social status, or winning approval. That’s part of the human condition. But as long as there’s something in there that’s actually for the experience itself, and not just for the self but for others’ experience, that leads to growth and development in the direction of flourishing—in the direction of love and wisdom, in terms of the things you love to do and the people you love to be with, and a deeper understanding of all that. These are different kinds of what I call humanistic growth. The transformative self puts us into situations where we’re acting for experientially meaningful reasons and, also, for reflective kinds of insights.
Is that related to the fostering of self-awareness?
It is absolutely. It’s a quiet kind of self-awareness, which is the other part of this whole thing. I’m writing a book with my friend and colleague, Heidi Wayment, on this, called The Quiet Ego. It’s a kind of mindfulness, an ego-divested awareness, but not necessarily that bare awareness of what’s going on right now and letting it go. It’s more like paying attention without a lot of hidden agendas—which is hard to do because they’re hidden.
As I was thinking about the inter-generational theme of this issue, I was wondering if it might pertain here. Our younger people now have grown up in a world of social media, influencers, and virtual realities. I’ve wondered how that might foster the development of a different kind of mind. We read commentaries by professors that speak to difficulty reading, focusing, or critically thinking. How might that change the trajectory of all this movement toward the good life and self-transformation?
That’s so interesting. Just yesterday, in my senior capstone class, we were talking about authenticity and social media. And, yeah, they’re highly skeptical that social media could facilitate authenticity. Although you might express yourself authentically on some platforms, it’s rarely used for that. It’s usually used for persuasion and not for truth, not for humanistic goodness. It’s more for self-promotion than self-development—and they have concern about that. Once I had them listen to an Ezra Klein interview with George Saunders, who talked about social media as language imposition. If you’ve got 140 characters to say what you mean, what are the chances that you can really say anything of meaning in that frame? He invited people to look at their minds after half an hour of scrolling through their media feeds compared to after half an hour of reading Chekhov. Is there greater presence of mind? Is there a greater capacity to deal with real life and human situations? It was wonderful to see the lights go on in their eyes. I have a lot of conversations with my students about humanistic kinds of concerns because they are really, really interested in humanistic versus materialistic or egoistic kinds of concerns. I do think Gen Z is taking these issues seriously. They often know their experience of the world is filtered through screens and algorithms, and they want that direct, authentic experience.
You know, the idea of focusing on these experientially meaningful activities is difficult, too, when there are daily material concerns that we have to balance and attend to. Some of my colleagues might think that my work and research is on all this happy and positive stuff. But no… growth is difficult. If there weren’t difficulty, there would be no concern or need for growth. A therapist might be helpful to foster self-monitoring, mentally noting the motives that we have. You have to actually be living your life, but to step aside sometimes and recognize whether we’re doing things for reasons that facilitate love and wisdom, or for things that are more self-serving like social status.
When you’re young, you don’t have as much in the rear-view mirror. So much meaning comes to us through the experience of pain over time.
One thing about this generation is that they have gone through some difficult stuff. This generation has lived through an economic catastrophe. Their lives have been disrupted by COVID. What I see in their essays is a level of emotional depth that I haven’t usually seen in that age group—and I study narratives for a living. Five or six years ago, I would show students narratives of young growth versus mature growth. The more mature ones would speak about how they grew through difficulties so that they began to understand the richness of life and the treasure that is a happy moment. College kids would say, “That sounds depressing to me.” But since COVID, they’re not saying that. They can handle positives and negatives happening together and weigh them. It seems like they can think at a deeper, more complex level. So that’s kind of hopeful.
Still, there’s something else about this model, this idea that hardship, difficulty, and struggle enhance our enjoyment of things and our happiness. There’s also a place in concepts of the good life that allows for not thinking and just enjoying something. When I think of humanistic experiencing, it involves the whole gamut. Meaning, wisdom, moral virtue, and all those kinds of eudaimonic things, are really important. But I argue that pleasure and meaning are irreducible goods. Many in the academic world think that the eudaimonic things are what really matter, and pure hedonic happiness doesn’t matter. But think of a person who’s wise but never hedonically happy. Would their life be improved if they also had hedonic happiness? The question then is how, theoretically, do we make that work? One of the things I do in the book is propose a system to make that work theoretically and empirically. People say they want both, not just one or the other. I think it’s clear that pleasure and meaning are both part of what it means to be human. So, I think a theoretical model of the good life should account for them both. They point down different paths of humanistic growth.
That becomes so important in our troubled world where we’re trying to stay engaged and, at the same time, preserve ourselves.
Definitely. Those are the two great orientations Maslow talked about—growth versus safety. We need both. It’s not just about growth. I differentiate growth from recovery. Recovery is about safety, about returning to baseline, escaping the bad. This is important. We absolutely need to recover. But we also need to grow and to flourish, if we’re lucky, and that involves a different set of motives. The whole person is a balance of all this, which is something I try to get across in the book, even if the focus is on growth.