The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative (Emory Symposia in Cognition)

The contributors to this book bring a surprisingly wide range of intellectual disciplines to bear on the discussion of self-narrative and the self. Using the ecological/cognitive approach, The Remembering Self relates ideas from the experimental, developmental, and clinical study of memory to insights from postmodernism 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, the authors consider 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.