How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (review)

Paul John Eakin. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. xii + 224 pp. Clothbound, $39.95. Paperback, $16.95.

When we write about our lives, the complex work of constructing the story is intertwined with all that constitutes the process of identity formation. In How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, Paul John Eakin expertly guides us through the thorny terrain of research in neurology, developmental psychology, and memory theory and revisits philosophy and literary theory. By the end of the journey, we have a far richer understanding of how individuals construct their lives and how they tell the story of that construction, as well as a sense of the dynamic interplay between the two processes.

This volume has rich implications for those of us concerned with the notion of identity--in literature and life writing and in the realm of health and disease. How individuals convey to others who they are, how they transform life into narrative--these issues are at the heart of both literary scholarship and the education of physicians. If we have to write our life stories in order to make our selves, if the self can only emerge through acts of language, then we must rethink the very nature of self and self-experience. And to understand autobiography as a lifelong biopsychosocial process of identity formation means that students of medicine must have the narrative competence both to hear their patients' stories and to translate them in the service of healing.

Eakin expands the conventional view of identity formation by including new conceptual frameworks that posit the body as the fundamental, grounding experience of who we are. Because autobiography's subject, or "I," refers to an individual, "a body living a human life," the bodiless "thinking substance" of Descartes's subject must be discarded as a model for understanding the self-representation of life writing (p. 8). Instead, the work of Elizabeth Grosz, Oliver Sacks, and Gerald Edelman, among others, illustrates that the notion of self is inescapably linked to body. Edelman's theory of neural group selection suggests that the brain's actual neural organization is constantly modified as an adaptive response to the dynamic demands of an individual's experience. His neural Darwinism seeks to understand how different experiential stimuli affecting the brain are bound together, thereby creating a "unified experience" (p. 15). The registering of these perceptions is conceived as a creative act of construction, and any biologically constructed model for framing a study of life writing must therefore be "dynamic and open-ended, conceiving of self and memory as interdependent dimensions of consciousness, anchored in the life of the body" (p. 21).

Philosopher Anthony Paul Kerby and psychologist Ulric Neisser develop theories of the self that are consistent with this model. Kerby's Narrative and the Self defines the self as the product of "narrative constructions or stories." He makes the case for self-narration as an essential human act of a "speaking-feeling embodied subject (the person)" (pp. 21-22). Neisser identifies five types of self-knowledge (the ecological, interpersonal, extended, private, and conceptual selves) that incorporate both the physiologic body and the linguistic, social body. Individuals live in a physical environment, and their senses allow perception of that environment and of their actions within it. With the acquisition of language, they engage in "self-representations" created from the totality of these five primary modes of experience.

If the physical body, including its neuronal wiring, is where the self lives, and self-narration originates in a physiologic body, then any effort at communion with a particular individual's self must necessarily begin at this juncture. Physicians and nurses and therapists live and work at this juncture. Patients put their bodies in our care, and where do we begin? We approach, gather information, ponder, and research--beginning with their stories, their narratives.

In a gesture of great practical assistance to those of us whose work depends on...