Suggested Outline for Autobiography

1.	Introduce your family setting.  Include all the important people present during your childhood and describe the physical, social, economic and historical settings in a few sentences.
2.	Recount your earliest memories and other memories that seem important to you in your maturation.
3.	Describe your interaction with your parents and others during your childhood. Include in your description any plots or interaction patterns common to the time.
4.	Describe your experience with grade school and friends.  Who, where and what was it like for you?
5.	Describe your experience of adolescence and high school.  How did you change in mental, social and behavioral ways?
6.	Describe your movement towards independence from your parents in later adolescence.
7.	Describe your college experience so far in terms of intellectual, emotional, social development.
8.	Describe yourself as you are now in terms of your similarities and differences from others, your hopes, your aspirations and your perception of your own mental processes.
9.	Describe how you think you will behave and change over the course of your life.  Include thoughts about career, romance, family, and how you are unique among human beings.
10.	Describe what you think you will be like when you are 65.
11.	Include anything else that you believe a reader of your autobiography would find either interesting or informative about you or the events of your life.
12.	Have fun!

Analysis of Autobiography

      The primary purpose of this paper is to coerce you into applying some of the theories we have been discussing in a concrete and personally meaningful way.  In order to balance the two desirable characteristics of having you use many theorists and having you consider each theory in depth, you will be required to use three theoretical viewpoints.  You must select one theorist from each list (A, B, C) below to use in your paper.

            A: Freud, Erikson, Bowlby (et al)

            B: Jung, Adler, Murray, Allport

            C: Maslow, Rogers, Existential, Eastern

     You should already have written an autobiography before you begin this assignment which you should turn in with your paper.   (I will return yours to you if you have turned it in.)

     You should then apply each of the three theoretical viewpoints you select to yourself as embodied in your autobiography.  In order to accomplish this assignment you will probably want to do the following:

1.	Describe your personality from each theoretical viewpoint.  You might want to include some description of the mental dynamics each viewpoint would have as tour personality.
2.	Describe how each theory would describe the process through which you came to be as you are.  What does the theory say about human development and how does this apply to you.
3.	Describe how you might have turned out differently given different circumstances from each theory's viewpoint.
4.	Describe how the theories would view the significance some particular event or circumstance in your autobiography.
5.	Add anything else you think useful.

     Try to limit your analysis to no more than 5 pages. 

     Remember that the basic task is to make sense of yourself in 3 different ways.  Don't get too much caught up in the minor details of any one theory.

     Enjoy the agony of creation.  This is way to examine yourself in a structured manner which is rare among sentient beings.  Doing so may aide you in escaping a sense of nothingness for a while.

     Grading will be on the basis of psychological insight and understanding of the theories as conveyed in your paper.