The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative (Emory Symposia in Cognition (No. 6)) PDF
Preview The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative (Emory Symposia in Cognition (No. 6))
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 The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK http: //www.cup.cam.ac.uk 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA http: //www.cup.org 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia © 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.
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