3 - The “remembered” self

Summary

The expression the remembered self is, I suspect, a cunningly designed oxymoron – rather like, say, the title of a recent book, The Remembered Present (Edelman, 1990), which also poses a conceptual challenge. I gladly accept the challenge, for I shall want to argue in what follows that Self is not an entity that one can simply remember, but is, rather, a complex mental edifice that one constructs by the use of a variety of mental processes, one of which must surely be remembering. I shall want to concentrate in what follows on the nature and course of these construction processes and upon some of the conditions that guide and constrain them.

Obviously, one of these processes is selective memory retrieval. But what sorts of criteria guide the selectivity? One set of them must surely be derived from some sort of “need” to emphasize agency, to recover memories related to the initiation of relatively autonomous acts governed by our intentional states – our wishes, desires, beliefs, and expectancies. This would be quite consistent with what has come to be called the “primary attribution error” (or “tendency”) according to which we attribute behavior not to circumstances but to dispositions and motives (cf. Griffin & Ross, 1991). And though we know that this tendency is more likely to be operative in judging and predicting others than in doing the same for ourselves, it is still a potent tendency in the latter case. The claim, simply, is that Self is a concept one of whose defining properties is agency. But this criterion also has, as it were, its flip side: Let us call it victimicy.