The development of self-narratives has been linked to the exercise of autonomy in the philosophical and psychological literature. People tell stories about themselves which help them recollect memories about past experiences, identify certain patterns and a sense of direction in their life events, and have some concept of what kind of persons they are, what they have achieved or failed to achieve, and what their future objectives are.
Contemporary philosophers have drawn attention to self-narratives in describing the nature of the self and the mechanisms underlying autonomous thought and action. For instance, Daniel Dennett argues that the self is a centre of narrative gravity: it is the fictional character the self-narrative talks about, a fiction by means of which we can impose some order on complicated autobiographical events. He argues that the narrative in which the self is the leading character is produced by the brain. This builds upon Michael Gazzaniga’s work where he describes what he calls an ‘interpreter module’ which provides a running commentary and forms hypotheses to explain the agent’s actions. In the narrative, there is one single entity to which attitudes and actions are ascribed, a unified self, a locus of agency. But, according to Dennett, this is not necessarily how things are outside the fiction, where there is no self over and beyond the ‘I’ in the running commentary.
David Velleman partially agrees with Dennett that the self is the character of a narrative, but argues that the narrative is not necessarily false, and thus the self may actually exist. The narrative can ‘make itself true’, because it can produce changes in behaviour. We tell a story in order to interpret the events in our lives, but then we also behave in such a way as to be faithful to the story we have been telling. This is the phenomenon of self-constitution, creating the self by making commitments about the future. According to Velleman, an autonomous agent is precisely an individual with the power of self-constitution. Motivated reconstruction and interpretation shape memories and contribute to the creation of the self as a narrative character, but this character exists outside the fiction, it is (to an extent at least) created by the narrative. This does not mean though that the narrative is always true and accurate. The narrative strives for coherence, and because of the very many factors that affect a person’s behaviour, coherence can sometimes be achieved only at the cost of distorting the facts. This does not necessarily lead to pathological confabulation or delusional memories, but is a feature of normal cognition.
There are everyday examples of unreliable self-narratives that are not pathological: in general, people go a long way to preserve a positive conception of their selves and their perception of their own successes and failures (e.g., self-serving biases) is often different from a third-person’s perception. However, when distortions are more severe, not even perceptual information or general principles of plausibility may serve as constraints on the narrative. For instance, patients with anosognosia (denial of illness) for arm paralysis may claim that their arm can and does move, even if they have no perceptual deficits and should be perfectly able to see that their arm lies motionless at their side. Such patients have not updated their narratives to include the presence of a serious impairment such as paralysis of their limbs, among their significant life events. In other pathological cases, for instance conditions involving memory impairment, motivational factors and limited access to personal information prevent the narrative from updating, and the narration becomes so insulated from the reality checks available to the narrator that it appears to others as blatantly false.
Next time we’ll see that delusions in general can also be characterised as unreliable self-narratives.
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