4 - Composing protoselves through improvisation

Summary

This is a theoretical essay about cognitive, emotional, social, and cultural activities that work together to create remembered selves through autobiographical remembering. It is not an essay about an abstraction – The Self. Instead, it is about selves that are grounded in, but emerge through productive remembering and productive interacting in, everyday life (Barclay & Smith, 1992). Such remembered selves are part of our phenomenal experiences of the individual; they are often shared and formed in interpersonal relationships. Remembered selves serve contemporary adaptive purposes, deriving their meaning in the seemingly mundane activities of daily living. What becomes one's remembered self at any particular moment is a gestalt composed and objectified in constructed and reconstructed “personal” and generic memories (Brewer, 1986; Pillemer, 1990). These memories have acquired personal and cultural significance through socially structured activities and transactions between people in face-to-face encounters. On this view, a contemporary remembered self is not a collection of debris haphazardly gathered up from various mental compartments that presumably reflect the compartmentalization of modern life into family, career, or leisure activities. Like Grene (1993), I prefer to think of a remembered self as being inseparable from a “historical self” such that memories are not fleeting fragments of a past more forgotten than remembered, but recollections that are part of a perceived pattern to one's life.

The essay is in four main sections. A theoretical overview is presented first, along with my purpose and position regarding the nature of the remembered self.