Defending the narrative self

The idea that the self is narrative in form is widely expressed in both academic study and everyday speech. It has also been widely disparaged. Criticism from philosophers has been especially vociferous, arguing not only that narrative views do not represent the best conception of self, but that they are misleading and potentially dangerous. In this paper, I develop and defend an account of the narrative self that addresses these challenges. I begin by exploring the charges made against narrative views in more detail, uncovering three distinct but interrelated objections. Using lessons from constructivist theories of episodic memory and narrative accounts of the self in developmental psychology (especially that of Robyn Fivush), I describe a view according to which a particular form of self-narration constitutes us as mature human selves by conferring a range of cognitive, behavioural and experiential capacities that enable sophisticated forms of social engagement. On this view, the self is not constituted by a self-narrative so much as we constitute ourselves as human selves by becoming self-narrators who construct our narratives within the constraints of a social–cultural framework. I show how this account addresses each of the three objections outlined at the beginning. This article is part of the discussion meeting issue ‘From being to identity: analysis and synthesis of the self’.