The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative (Emory Symposia in Cognition (No. 6))

315 Pages·1994·5.67 MB·English

by  Ulric Neisser (editor)

This book brings a surprisingly wide range of intellectual dis-
ciplines to bear on the self-narrative and the self. The same
ecological/cognitive approach that successfully organized Ulric
Neisser's earlier volume The Perceived Self now relates ideas from
the experimental, developmental, and clinical study of memory
to insights from postmodernism and literature. Although auto-
biographical remembering is an essential way of giving meaning
to our lives, the memories we construct are never fully consistent
and often simply wrong. In the first chapter, Neisser considers
the so-called false memory syndrome in this context. Other con-
tributors discuss the effects of amnesia, the development of re-
membering in childhood, the social construction of memory and
its alleged self-servingness, and the contrast between literary and
psychological models of the self. Jerome Bruner, Peggy Miller,
Alan Baddeley, Kenneth Gergen, and Daniel Albright are among
the contributors to this unusual synthesis.

Emory Symposia in Cognition 6
The remembering self

The remembering self
Construction and accuracy
in the self-narrative
Edited by
ULRIC NEISSER
and
ROBYN FIVUSH
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP, United Kingdom
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Cambridge University Press 1994
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and
to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1994
Typeset in Baskerville
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available
ISBN 0-521-43194-8 hardback
Transferred to digital printing 2003
Contents
Preface page vii
List of contributors ix
1 Self-narratives: True and false 1
ULRIC NEISSER
2 Literary and psychological models of the self 19
DANIEL ALBRIGHT
3 The "remembered" self 41
JEROME BRUNER
4 Composing protoselves through improvisation 55
CRAIG R. BARCLAY
5 Mind, text, and society: Self-memory in social context 78
KENNETH J. GERGEN
6 Personal identity and autobiographical recall 105
GREG J. N El MEYER AND APRIL E. METZLER
7 Constructing narrative, emotion, and self
in parent-child conversations about the past 136
ROBYN FIVUSH
8 Narrative practices: Their role in socialization
and self construction 158
PEGGY J. MILLER
9 Comments on children's self-narratives 180
REBECCA A. EDER
10 Is memory self-serving ? 191
WILLEM A. WAGENAAR
11 Creative remembering 205
MICHAEL ROSS AND ROGER BUEHLER
12 The remembered self and the enacted self 236
ALAN BADDELEY
VI CONTENTS
13 The authenticity and utility of memories 243
EUGENE WINOGRAD
14 The remembered self in amnesics 252
WILLIAM HIRST
15 Perception is to self as memory is to selves 278
EDWARD S. REED
Name index 293
Subject index 299
Preface
Several independent lines of thought come together in this book. The
first of these is an ecological/cognitive analysis of the self that was initially
proposed by one of us (Ulric Neisser) in 1988. Five different sources of
self-relevant information were identified in that analysis and described in
terms of the different "selves" that they establish. The "ecological" and
"interpersonal" selves, based on perception, have been considered in a
preceding volume called The Perceived Self. The "private" and "concep-
tual" selves will be the subject of a volume currently in preparation. Here
we are concerned with what was initially called the "temporally ex-
tended" self- that is, with memory and the self-narrative.
The second group of ideas that animates this book comes from recent
studies of memory development. The research of the last few years, in-
cluding our own (Robyn Fivush), has made it obvious that remembering
does not just happen. Instead it is a skill that must be learned, a socially
motivated activity with a specific developmental history in early child-
hood. This means that the remembering self has a course of development
too, one that is explored in several of these chapters.
Our third theme is one of the more prominent currents in late 20th-
century intellectual life. The concept of narrative has recently become
important across a surprisingly wide range of disciplines. The seven fields
listed on the contributor information page of the Journal of Narrative and
Life History - anthropology, education, folklore studies, linguistics, liter-
ary criticism, psychology, and sociology - are just the tip of the iceberg;
history, philosophy, and theology are among many that could be added.
One of the key ideas in this movement is that narratives are not fixed or
static; rather, they change with every retelling. Many contributors to this
volume remind us that this is especially true of 5^-narratives. There is
not just one single "remembered self," permanently established by some
fixed set of memory traces. Different occasions must, should, and do elicit
different accounts of the past. Our title, The Remembering Self was chosen
to emphasize that flexibility.
If we had written this preface two years ago, our list of underlying
Vll
Vlll PREFACE
themes might have ended at this point. In that brief time, something
remarkable has happened in America. The accuracy of the self-narrative
is no longer of interest only to scholars: It has become front-page news.
This is because of a striking increase in what seem to be recollections of
childhood sexual abuse, often recalled for the first time - decades after
the alleged events - in the course of psychotherapy. Although some of
these recollections are surely valid, we believe that many others are not.
The term false memory syndrome has recently been coined to describe such
cases. Because this issue had not surfaced at the time of the conference
on which the present volume is based, most of our contributors do not
discuss it. Nevertheless, as Neisser argues in the introductory chapter, it
lies very close to the core of the issues with which this book is concerned.
A grant from the Mellon Foundation to Emory University has made it
possible to convene a series of conferences on different aspects of the self.
The third of these meetings, convened by the Emory Cognition Project
in January 1991, dealt with "The Remembered Self." It was remarkably
successful, beginning with Daniel Albright's brilliant contrast between lit-
erary and psychological models of the self (chap. 2 of this volume) and
continuing in the same vein of interdisciplinary exploration for two and
a half days. All the major contributions to that conference are included
here, along with a new introductory chapter.
Although this is only the second of our volumes on the self, it is the
Sixth Emory Symposium on Cognition. Like all the others, it brings eco-
logical and developmental perspectives to bear on a significant problem
in cognitive psychology. Also like all the others, it is essentially interdisci-
plinary in its orientation: We believe that psychologists have a lot to learn
from colleagues in other fields. Certainly we ourselves have learned a
great deal from the contributors to this symposium. We are deeply grate-
ful for their contributions, their insights, and their friendship. And also,
alas, for their patience: Once again it has taken much too long to get the
show on the road!
But here it is at last. Like the narratives that form its subject matter,
The Remembering Self is not intended simply as a record of a significant
past event (the 1991 conference). It is also aimed at the future, shaped to
a purpose. We hope it will contribute to the ongoing theoretical ex-
changes - about truth and falsehood, memory and development, the self
and self-knowledge - that make the ecological study of cognition so inter-
esting. If that happens, we will be more than satisfied.