Establishing the Relativity of the Individual Mind

For roughly a century, the dominant account of selfhood in psychology, philosophy, and the social sciences has held that the individual self is derivative of the social and narrative field — constituted by it, and possessing no independent standing. This paper rejects the premise beneath that account while retaining its conclusions within their domain. The premise is that when two people use a word, they stand in the same relation to what it means. It is nowhere argued for in the literature, because it does not present as a claim; it presents as a condition of having a mind. The paper names it the Narrative Postulate, on the model of the parallel postulate, and shows that it cannot be derived: any proof of a shared meaning field must be constructed inside a shared meaning field. Narrative meaning is therefore a convention rather than a conclusion — and, as with Euclid's fifth, other conventions are constructible. The argument is grounded in a case the traditional model cannot accommodate. Following a traumatic brain injury in 1987 that produced global aphasia undiagnosed for twenty-seven years, alongside undiagnosed synesthetic autism, the author lost access to the postulate itself. Language returned; the assumption did not, which establishes the two as separable. Standard trauma resolution requires locating experience within a context, context is constituted in language, and the period in question was continuous, meaningful, and non-linguistic. No context could be formed from inside the experience, and none could be supplied from outside, as no comparable case exists from which to infer. Dismissing the period as meaningless was not available; leaving the trauma unresolved was not biologically available. The bind is shown to be structural rather than a failure of technique or of practitioner competence. Two documented instances are offered as data. A 2005 computer science senior project produced fluent poetic form with no aesthetic core, and an audience that could not detect the absence. The 1987 aphasia produced the inverse: an intact meaning-core with no linguistic form for ten to twelve days, experienced as ordinary. Form without core, core without form — the structure of a double dissociation, indicating that linguistic form and meaning-core are two capacities where the tradition has one term. The proposed expansion uses placeholder consciousness: individual perspective is admitted as meaningful without determining its nature, on the model of the admission of zero and later of i into the number system, then placed in relation to narrative convention rather than reduced to it. What is communicated on this account is structure rather than content, reconstituted by each reader from their own experience. The gravitas of individual experience bends the linearity of the Narrative Postulate as the sun bends the space around it to account for the orbit of Mercury — hence relativity. Distortion by the individual mind becomes a necessary feature of meaning rather than a pathology or an error. Three domains in which previously intractable problems become tractable are reported: neurodiversity without pathology or infantilization, trauma resolution without collapse into a shared framework, and archetypal work outside social gatekeeping. Sixteen working frameworks developed from this footing are listed.