The Remembering Self


Book Description

Ecological/cognitive approach applied to self-narrative.




The Autobiographical Self in Time and Culture


Book Description

This book traces the developmental, social, cultural, and historical origins of the autobiographical self - the self that is made of memories of the personal past and of the family and the community. It combines rigorous research, compelling theoretical insights, sensitive survey of real memories and memory conversations, and fascinating personal anecdotes to convey a message: the autobiographical self is conditioned by one's time and culture.




Narrative and Identity


Book Description

Annotation This text evolved out of a December 1995 conference at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, attended by scholars from psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, social sciences, literary theory, classics, communication, and film theory, and exploring the importance of narrative as an expression of our experience, as a form of communication, and as a form for understanding the world and ourselves. Nine scholars from Canada, the US, and Europe contribute 12 essays on the relationship between narrative and human identity, how we construct what we call our lives and create ourselves in the process. Coverage includes theoretical perspectives on the problem of narrative and self construction, specific life stories in their cultural contexts, and empirical and theoretical issues of autobiographical memory and narrative identity. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).




Remembering Our Past


Book Description

This book reviews the latest research in the field of autobiographical memory.




The Self in Time


Book Description

Human reasoning is marked by an ability to remember one's personal past and to imagine one's future. Together these capacities rely on the notion of a temporally extended self or the self in time. Recent evidence suggests that it is during the preschool period that children first construct this form of self. By about four years of age, children can remember events from their pasts and reconstruct a personal narrative integrating these events. They know that past events in which they participated affect present circumstances. They can also imagine the future and make decisions designed to bring about desirable future events even in the face of competing immediate gratification. This book brings together the leading researchers on these issues and for the first time in literature, illustrates how a unified approach based on the idea of a temporally extended self can integrate these topics.




Memory, Narrative, Identity


Book Description

This book explores the complex relationships that exist between memory, nostalgia, writing and identity.




The Self and Memory


Book Description

How we think of ourselves depends largely on what we remember from our lives, and what we remember is biased in many ways by how we think of ourselves. The complex interplay of the self and memory is the topic of this volume.




Autobiographical Memory Development


Book Description

Autobiographical memory is constituted from the integration of several memory skills, as well as the ability to narrate. This all helps in understanding our relation to self, family contexts, culture, brain development, and traumatic experiences. The present volume discusses contemporary approaches to childhood memories and examines cutting-edge research on the development of autobiographical memory. The chapters in this book written by a group of leading authors, each make a unique contribution by describing a specific developmental domain. In providing a multinational and multicultural perspective on autobiographical memory development—and by covering a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, this state-of-the-book is essential reading on the autobiographical memory system for memory researchers and graduate students. It is also of interest to scholars and students working more broadly in the fields of cognitive, developmental, and social psychology, and to academics who are conducting interdisciplinary research on neuroscience, family relationships, narrative methods, culture, and oral history.




Rewriting the Self


Book Description

Originally published in 1993. This book explores the process by which individuals reconstruct the meaning and significance of past experience. Drawing on the lives of such notable figures as St Augustine, Helen Keller and Philip Roth as well as on the combined insights of psychology, philosophy and literary theory, the book sheds light on the intricacies and dilemmas of self-interpretation in particular and interpretive psychological enquiry more generally. The author draws upon selected, mainly autobiographical, literary texts in order to examine concretely the process of rewriting the self. Among the issues addressed are the relationship of rewriting the self to the concept of development, the place of language in the construction of selfhood, the difference between living and telling about it, the problem of facts in life history narrative, the significance of the unconscious in interpreting the personal past, and the freedom of the narrative imagination. Alpha Sigma Nu National Book Award winner in 1994