The Remembering Self
Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative

Ecological/cognitive approach applied to self-narrative.

Ulric Neisser (Edited by), Robyn Fivush (Edited by)

9780521431941, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 October 1994

316 pages, 4 b/w illus. 14 tables
23.7 x 15.7 x 2.4 cm, 0.606 kg

"This book presents a clear focus on a topic of great importance to researchers and clinicians. It should point the way to further research and theory development....This work is a valuable contribution."
Harris Chaiklin, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

This book brings a surprisingly wide range of intellectual disciplines to bear on the self-narrative and the self. The same ecological/cognitive approach that successfully organized Ulric Neisser's earlier volume on The Perceived Self now relates ideas from the experimental, developmental, and clinical study of memory to insights from post-modernism and literature. Although autobiographical 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 contributors discuss the effects of amnesia, the development of remembering 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.

1. Self-narratives: true and false Ulric Neisser
2. Literary and psychological models of the self Daniel Albright
3. The remembered self Jerome Bruner
4. Composing protoselves through improvisation Craig R. Barclay
5. Mind, text and society: self-memory in social context Kenneth J. Gergen
6. Personal identity and autobiographical recall Greg J. Niemeyer and April E. Metzler
7. Constructing narrative, emotion, and self in parent-child conversations about the past Robyn Fivush
8. Narrative practices: their role in socialization and self-construction Peggy J. Miller
9. Emotionality and narrative in the emergence of the self-concept Rebecca A. Eder
10. Is memory self-serving? Wilem A. Wagenaar
11. Creative remembering Michael Ross and Roger Buehler
12. The remembered self and the enacted self Alan Baddeley
13. The authenticity and utility of memories Eugene Winograd
14. The remembered self in amnesics William Hirst
15. Perception is to self as memory is to selves Edward S. Reed.

Subject Areas: Social, group or collective psychology [JMH]