In Your Whole Life: Beyond Childhood and Adulthood, James Bernard Murphy focuses on our shared human identity, something he believes is needed if we are to move forward toward greater tolerance, justice and harmony. What we share, contends Murphy, is the desire to explain a whole human life, what accounts for our unity over time. He offers a developmental story of human nature based on a “nested hierarchy” of the following three powers: “First, each person’s unique human genome ensures biological identity over time; second, each person’s powers of imagination and memory ensure psychological identity over time; third, each person’s ability to tell his own life story ensures narrative identity over time” (p. 3).

Early on in the book Murphy comments that “this book is about how we develop, not how we descended from primates” (p. 2). Casting aside Charles Darwin and evolutionary biology, Murphy turns instead to four basic stories of human development all derived before Darwin’s birth in the nineteenth century: these stories are advanced by Aristotle, Jesus of Nazareth, Augustine, and Rousseau. Part I of the book titled “Stories of Development” consists of five chapters (approximately half the book) that canvass the intellectual history of ideas concerning human development. Murphy emphasizes five stories of development from these historical treatments: (1) indirect development—indirect developers develop through metamorphosis (like a caterpillar or the discontinuity we see between children and adults); (2) recapitulation—“a handy way to organize the messy complexity of evolution, history, and development along a single hierarchy from lower to higher” (p. 22); (3) preformationism—“development is merely a matter of getting larger” (p. 23); (4) epigenesis—“development is the process whereby the generic becomes the specific and the outline becomes the detailed blueprint” (p. 23); and (5) neotny—which is “juvenilization” and comes from the Greek, meaning “to stretch out or prolong youthfulness” (p. 24).

Murphy traces the historical development of these different accounts of human development in part 1, addressing Aristotle’s ideas about teleology, Augustine’s attempt to view the human life from God’s point of view, Rousseau’s account of the transition from amour de soi to amour propre, and Matthew’s account of Jesus telling the disciples to become humble like a child. The underlying assumption of these diverse and disparate historical accounts is that they converge to yield a coherent, accurate, and normatively prescriptive account of human development. This convergence is the focus of part II titled “Unifying the Whole.” A concluding chapter contains five “practicums” to guide our life writing.

The thinkers Murphy invokes to unpack his account of human development are varied and comprehensive, though also limited. His argument is anchored in centuries-old philosophical and theological treatments of the topic of human development. Aristotle is foundational to Murphy’s argument: he takes Aristotle to be “the only great philosopher who was also a biologist, and his biological understanding of development is what makes him an essential guide to human life” (pp. 3–4). I agree with Murphy that Aristotle is certainly a great philosopher, but our understanding of biology has significantly improved in the last two millennia. Over just the past century, science has contributed significant insights to our understanding of human development from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. Murphy notes (p. 102) that developmental psychologist Erik Erikson claimed that more has been learned about human development in the twentieth century than in all of earlier history. Erikson’s sentiment is one I share, which made me wonder why Murphy grounded his analysis of human development in philosophical theories and religious beliefs about human development, rather than these recent scientific accounts. As an intellectual history of the ideas of human development, part I of Your Whole Life offers an interesting account of how pre-scientific thinkers grappled with these ideas. But I was not persuaded that engaging with these historical accounts was that helpful in bringing those insights together to present a coherent and plausible account of human development.

In the introduction, Murphy notes that “the study of human life is intrinsically multidisciplinary” (p. 4). But rather than ground his project in the latest empirical findings concerning human development (especially psychology), Murphy instead advances a developmental story of human nature that is based on a “nested hierarchy of three powers.” There are important psychological accounts of development, especially of adults, that I would have liked to see Murphy engage with to test and assess his account of development. For example, the research of developmental psychologist Robert Kegan has focused on adult development; his findings would challenge the premise of Murphy’s account that there is a shared story of development. Kegan (The Evolving Self, 1982) distinguishes between three stages of adult development in the modern world: the social mind (we rely on authority for guidance), the self-authoring mind (a person is capable of stepping back from the socially embedded norms of the culture and critically assessing them), and the self-transforming mind (a person is capable of invoking multiple value systems at the same time and evaluating which is most suitable in any particular context). Kegan contends that only a minority of the adult population reaches the stages of development beyond the socialized mind; his account of the social mind does cohere with Murphy’s discussion of our following “society’s script” (p. 182). Kegan also contends that the self-transforming mind has never been reached before age 40. This theory of development offers an intriguing comparison with Aristotle’s conjecture that we are mentally at our prime by around age 50. Engaging more with the science of human development would have, I believe, made Murphy’s arguments more interesting and compelling.

Other influential psychological theories of development that would be very germane to Murphy’s project include John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth’s research into “attachment theory.” This is addressed, in a peripheral way, by Murphy when he acknowledges that our parents write the first several chapters of our lives and “many of us never escape our parental narratives” (p. 182). An account of human development founded on insights from attachment theory would, in my opinion, have offered a more defensible and plausible account than one that invokes Augustine and Jesus. Similarly, significant contributions have been made to the science of psychological change through “story editing” by Timothy Wilson (Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By, 2015) and “acceptance and commitment therapy” by Steven Hayes (A Liberated Mind, 2019). Finally, Dan Siegal’s work on interpersonal neurobiology (Mindsight, 2010) is also very relevant to Murphy’s project. All of these areas of scientific research would have made for interesting points of convergence and divergence with Murphy’s account of development. By pre-committing the core of his analysis to an engagement with thinkers who lived before the nineteenth century, Murphy’s argument amounts to an interesting intellectual history of ideas concerning human development rather than a coherent, empirically informed, and normatively prescriptive account of human development designed to help us create more tolerant and just societies.

In the concluding chapter Murphy details five practicums in an innovative but short part of the book. The five practicums are (1) learning to be the editor of your life; (2) learning from the classics; (3) learning from biographies; (4) stories of redemption; and (5) write your own obituary and eulogy. Each is expanded on in only a paragraph or two but concisely detail the prescriptions of Murphy’s account of development. Had these five practicums received the extensive detail and attention given to the historical influences on Murphy’s ideas, the coherence and social significance of his account of development would have been amplified more effectively. These practicums’ potential for promoting greater tolerance, justice, and harmony is not really developed in the book. The details of Murphy’s account of development and narrative would also have profited by addressing how specific challenges that humans tend to face at different stages of the life span—such as the pressures to fit into social cliques during our formative adolescence, choosing a career, issues relating to marriage and family, and the stressors of illness, unemployment, and the death of a loved one—affect (for better or worse) our powers of imagination, memory, and story editing.

The themes and concerns of Your Whole Life are important and worthy of engagement. Although I may disagree with Murphy about which fields of knowledge are most relevant to undertaking such an interdisciplinary project, he is to be commended for writing such an innovative and interesting book.