1 - Self-narratives: True and false

Summary

Human beings exist through time, just as everything else does: One thing happens after another. But unlike anything else, people remember what happened to them – some of it, anyway. This is a remarkable achievement. The remarkable thing is not just that past events influence the present (which happens in all biological systems) but that they are explicitly reconstructed by the person who experienced them. By definition, such reconstructions are examples of episodic memory. If the remembered event seems to have played a significant part in the life of the rememberer, it becomes an example of autobiographical memory and may form part of a life narrative. Life narratives are significant because they are one way of defining the self.

This book has two goals: to explore the relations between remembering and the self, and to see those relations in proper perspective. Life narratives are often described as if they were the chief or even the only ingredient of the self: “They [life narratives] are the basis of personal identity and self-understanding and they provide answers to the question ‘Who am I?’ ” (Polkinghorne, 1991, p. 136). This claim goes too far: Self-knowledge depends on perception, conceptualization, and private experience as well as narrative (Neisser, 1988). Self-narratives are a basis but not the basis of identity. It is appropriate, then, that the present volume is only one of a series devoted to self-knowledge and the self. An earlier book (Neisser, 1993a) was concerned with ecological and interpersonal perception; the self-concept will be considered in a subsequent volume.

However important those other sources of self-knowledge may be, they are not our focus here.