Personalities as Dramatis Personae: An Interdisciplinary Examination of the Self as Author

In a commentary featured in the TLS about a year ago, Galen Strawson argues against what he terms "a fallacy of our age": that "human beings typically experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort, or at least as a collection of stories."¹ To this fallacy, he writes, a "vast chorus of assent rises from the humanities—from literary studies, psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, political theory, religious studies, echoed back by psychotherapy, medicine, law, marketing, design"—and he names among its principal expositors Jerry Bruner, Daniel Dennett, Alasdair MacIntyre, Paul Ricoeur, Oliver Sacks, and Charles Taylor (13–14). Strawson's basic argument is that not every life is conceived or lived as a narrative—that "there are deeply non-Narrative people" (13)—and to that bold assertion, as formulated, there can be no rejoinder. But the formulation is key: Strawson tends to write in terms of "lives" rather than "selves," and in rendering his argument more or less self-free, he bypasses the heart of the matter.

Certainly there are people—and Strawson claims to be one of them—who do not tend to, or simply cannot, tell stories about their lives in a way that makes for continuous narrative. Like any other known behavior, the capacity to construct narratives is normally distributed. For example, some people dream and remember their dreams frequently and vividly; others seem not to dream or to remember their dreams rarely, if ever. Strawson apparently feels that there are two kinds of people—he terms them "Diachronics" and "Episodics"—when it might be more accurate to place these types at the extreme ends of a continuum. The likelihood is that most people fall somewhere in between these two, with some aspects of a typical life feeling disconnected from a present self and some aspects feeling very much continuous with it. Had Strawson focused on the self rather than the life as the object of narrative, he might have come to different conclusions. Each of us has only one life, but there is no reason to assume that each of us has only one self. In psychology, since the time of William James's writings on the multiplicity of the self, the idea of a singular self (and hence a single self-narrative) has been complemented by copious discussion of multiple selves as the normal state of human affairs. While Strawson mentions central figures in this discussion, the absence from his commentary of any reference to Ulric Neisser, the "father of cognitive psychology," is disquieting. An examination of Neisser's work (especially his Five Kinds of Self Knowledge) suggests a basic resolution for the dichotomous quandary into which Strawson places himself and us.²

Briefly, Neisser argues that there are five kinds of selves, all of which contribute to overall self-knowledge. The ecological self is the self as directly perceived with respect to the immediate physical environment; the interpersonal self, also directly perceived, is established by species-specific signals of emotional rapport and communication; the extended self is based on memory and anticipation; the private self appears when we discover that our conscious experiences are exclusively our own; the conceptual self (or "self concept") draws its meaning from a network of socially based assumptions and theories about human nature in general and our own selves in particular. "Although these selves are rarely experienced as distinct," Neisser writes, "they differ in their developmental histories, in the accuracy with which we can know them, in the pathologies to which they are subject, and generally in what they contribute to human experience."³ Strawson's major concern is, in Neisser's terms, with the "extended self" and, perhaps, the "conceptual self"—with what we remember about our past and with how we see our various selves. For a psychologist like Neisser, acutely aware of individual differences, the form and depth of the "extended self" must vary across any population from the extreme diachronic to the extreme episodic. Were Strawson to incorporate some of Neisser's notions into his own procrustean...