What does someone put in the Witness Protection Program have in common with someone who got edited into a reality TV villain and someone who became paraplegic? Each has experienced identity theft. And you might have too. Psychologists define identity as the integrative story that weaves together our lived experience and provides us with a sense of unity and purpose. We are not only the main character in this story, but we’re also the narrator – we can’t always choose what happens to us, but we can choose the meaning that we make of those experiences. But in extreme cases, we lose narrative authority over our lives. We persist as the main character of our story, but the role of narrator gets taken by someone else, or by some other force. While few of us face such dramatic experiences, extreme cases of identity theft help us understand how our life stories are actually shared projects. Rather than precious possessions to be protected and defended, identity is created in the embodied dynamic interactions between our stories and other people’s stories. This talk will describe a book project that uses identity theft to help us understand the way identity takes shape in the United States today and envisions a different path forward. Weaving together perspectives from the social sciences (psychology), the humanities (disability studies), and the arts (theater), this talk will catalyze a broad-ranging conversation about who we are, and who we might become.

 

Our Cornille Scholar is uniquely positioned to share these insights. Professor Adler is a Professor of Psychology at Olin College of Engineering and a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Medical School. He is also the Editor of Personality and Social Psychology Review, the top-ranked journal in those fields, devoted to theory development. And he is the Chief Academic Officer at Health Story Collaborative, a Cambridge-based non-profit aimed at elevating the role of stories in American healthcare. For the past decade, Professor Adler’s research has focused on identity development among people with disabilities, drawing from perspectives in disability studies. Professor Adler is also a theater director and playwright. His play, Reverse Transcription (co-authored with Jim Petosa), premiered Off-Broadway in July 2022, at The Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2, produced by PTP/NYC.