For over a century, psychologists have described adolescence as a time of heightened psychological risk for girls. This article explores a relational impasse or crisis of connection that we have observed in girls' lives at adolescence by tracing through time the thoughts and feelings of two 12-year-old girls who were interviewed as part of a 5-year longitudinal study of girls' psychological development. Using a voice-centered relational method, we join the experiences of struggle and resistance at this developmental juncture with the problems that have been seen as central to the psychology of women.
The telling of stories in moral education has a long and universal tradition. In the study of moral development, however, the uses and power of narrative in both forming and conveying a moral sense have been largely ignored. Mark Tappan and Lyn Brown argue that narrative is central to the study as well as to the teaching of morality, and that acknowledgment of authorship of moral choices, actions, and feelings marks the endpoint of the development of moral sensibility. Children's storytelling, they believe, creates authorship when the audience is responsive and the story told represents real experience. By presenting thoughtful and challenging evidence for the role of storytelling, these authors represent a perspective much needed in the field of moral development.
In what societal and cultural framework? When these four questions are asked of traditional approaches to the study of human development, they reveal the canonical voice of developmental psychology (the voice generally construed not as a voice but rather as the truth) to be oracular, seemingly objective, dispassionate, and disembodied. Yet, paradoxically, this "objective and disembodied" voice also presumes, at least implicitly, a male body, a story about relationships that is, at its center, a story about separation, and a society that men govern within the framework of Western civilization. By changing the voice, the body, the story about relationships (including one's perspective on the canonical story), and the societal and cultural framework, we are attempting to recast psychology as a practice of relationship (rather than a profession of the truth). As such, we are also asking what relationships are good in the sense of enabling and encouraging what we call psychological health or human development. In part, the success of this endeavor depends on answering the question "who are we?", and on recognizing that, as psychologists, we are in positions of authority and power: We are able to (licensed to) treat people,
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.