This document contains four papers about the ideological structure of personality. A proposal for a theoretical and methodological reworking of the life-historical inquiry of personality psychology is presented along with a report of some preliminary studies that employ an intensive life-history approach to a distinct topic within the context of personality structure and form a series of independent but conceptually related research efforts. The introductory paper provides theoretical comments and an overview. Work on the refraction of power relations within the "my" themes of self-representation is presented in the second paper, based on an analysis of one woman's life-history narrative. The next paper uses material from an interview with one man to outline a thesis on self-representation commonly implicated in the processes of making major life decisions. The final paper examines the constraints to rationality in the development of democratic attitudes, as demonstrated by interviews with an auto worker concerning his attitudes toward proposals for workplace democratization. The set of papers argues that the study of personality functions is necessarily the study of ideological processes that requires explicit, systematic, and critical confrontation in order to be scientific. (Author/NRB)