In their search for the ingredients to be found in a generative society, McAdams and Logan (2004, p. 18) turn to a distinction first offered by Bakan in 1966 between agency and communion. On the one hand, generativity is all about extending the influence and appearance of one’s self beyond one’s death. This resides at the heart of generativity. It is about the search for immortality first identified by Plato. This embrace of generativity is aligned with agency: “the organismic tendency toward self-expression, self-expansion, self-protection, self-development, and all other goals promoting the individual self.” (McAdams and Logan, 2004, p. 18) We find this generative agency to often hover on the edge of narcissism and, in its extreme, is a source of individualism and the kind of self-absorption of which Christopher Lasch (1991) wrote in The Culture of Narcissism.
While many of the generativity examples we have offered are founded on this self-oriented agency, we propose along with McAdams and Logan that generativity (as displayed through all four roles) can only be sustained if agency is counter-balanced with communion: “the organismic tendency toward the self with others, merging the self in community, giving up the self for the good of something beyond the self.” (McAdams and Logan, 2004, p. 18)
It is this further extension of self in time and space which enables us to be fully capable of caring deeply. We need agency to move beyond mere empathy, and we need communion to see how caring must be viewed from what we previously identified as seeing the “big picture” when engaging in caring activities. Furthermore, we propose, along with McAdams and Logan, the successful interplay between agency and communion requires that one is participating in a generative society.
To focus more specifically, we note that throughout McAdams and Logan’s The Generative Society book, attention turns to all four generative roles-even if not specifically identified as such.
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