How Does the Self Adjudicate Narratives?

Philosophers and psychologists have advanced a plethora of explanations of the self in relation to narratives, positing varying degrees of connection between them. For some, narratives created by a subject about herself shape her self-constitution (Flanagan 1991; Fivush 1994). For others, they help the subject to participate in social cognition (Hutto 2008). Some represent narratives as merely one basis of personal identity and consider them cognitive tools used by the subject to construct self-concepts (Neisser 1997; Tekin 2011); others render narratives the basis for self-constitution (Dennett 1992; MacIntyre 1981; Schechtman 1996). Some require that the subject create her ‘whole life narrative’ unifying her life experiences (Schechtman 1996; Flanagan 1991); others appeal to ‘multiple narratives’ about the subject, authored by herself and/or others (Fivush 2007; Neisser 1997; Tekin 2010). Psychologists use empirical studies of memory, joint reminiscence of the past, and parent–child narratives (Fivush and Nelson 2006; Hoerl and McCormack 2005), whereas philosophers work with thought experiments and appeal to mental disorders to connect narratives and the self (Flanagan 1996).

In “Whole Life Narratives and the Self,” David Lumsden (2013) joins the debate, arguing that a multiplicity of self-narratives is implicated in personal identity. He scrutinizes the rich philosophical critical landscape, juxtaposing narrative theories to neo-Lockean accounts of personal identity, and emphasizes the strengths of the former. He argues that there are good reasons to salvage narrative theories without committing to their stringent demands, such as the necessity of a whole life narrative for personal identity. For Lumsden, a person is a bundle of narrative threads, not a single whole life narrative. Yet a subject can have multiple narrative threads without sacrificing unity. In his view, this is more plausible than other narrative theories and should offer a suitable context for engaging with persons with mental disorders.

However, Lumsden’s proposal encounters a challenge that needs to be addressed if the theory is to offer resources for engaging with persons with mental disorders. I shall call this the adjudication-of-narratives problem (AP). If a person is a bundle of narrative threads with links in consciousness and the unconscious, as Lumsden argues, and if these threads sometimes offer alternate narrations of the same life episode, by virtue of emphasizing different details of the rich tapestry of the same life episode, how does the subject adjudicate these when/if they conflict? I stress that my addressing of this issue is not to argue against Lumsden, because I find his theory appealing in both its responsiveness to the experiences of persons we encounter in our daily lives and its call for diminishing the stringent requirements of narrative theories to make them amenable to the context of psychopathology. Rather, in a bid to fine-tune the practical aspects of his proposal, I look more closely at the complexity of the connection between the self and narratives, as well as the complexity of the mental disorder experience.

According to Lumsden, a narrative selects from a range of rich details of a subject’s life, connects the subject to her experiences, and captures the connection between the details and her mental state. Narrative threads are: (i) sequential, (ii) plotted, (iii) incomplete in contrast to life, (iv) created by the subject herself, and (v) available to consciousness. The third feature of narratives, their incompleteness in contrast to life, substantiates Lumsden’s rejection of the necessity of ‘whole life’ narratives for personal identity. Narratives’ incompleteness should not be taken as an indication of failure to capture life’s richness; rather, different narrative threads can emphasize different facets of the rich texture of the same life episode. According to the fourth feature, narratives that are implicated in personal identity are created by the subject herself. AP arises when/if narratives about the same life episode conflict with each other, and I argue that (iii) and (iv) underlie this sort of conflict.

Following (iii), it is plausible that the narratives I create about the same life episode come into conflict because each captures a different (and incomplete) set of details. Following (iv), it is...