This book has been written from the perspective of a university teacher whose research has been in the field of mammalian reproductive physiology but who is also much interested by developments in animal genetics and molecular biology. Preparing the individual chapters offered an exciting opportunity for bringing these disciplines together in various ways. The result is seen primarily as a text for advanced (Honours) undergraduates in Schools of Biological Sciences, Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and Animal Science. It should also appeal to those on taught MSc courses and to PhD students interested in both developmental biology and reproductive physiology in the higher mammals.

The book was planned during my time in the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Montréal, but the administrative commitment there – together with lecturing and activities in the operating theatre – meant that a serious spell of writing had to await my return to Edinburgh. In fact, the chapters were prepared in draft between May 1991 and June 1993, and then brought up to date as far as December 1993 on the basis of the extensive journal coverage available in the University of Edinburgh libraries. A small number of 1994 references has also been included.

As to the origins of this work, they almost certainly date back to the author's post-doctoral days in Paris (1968–1970) listening to lectures on sexual differentiation by the late Professor A.

The use of narrative as a socializing tool is most apparent when myths or traditional tales, embodying the collective wisdom of a people, are told in a deliberate attempt to edify or enlighten. Among the Western Apache, for example, stories about the early history of the group are directed at transgressors on the belief that they will be moved to reflect upon and correct their misconduct (Basso, 1984). In such cases narrative serves overtly as a “culture-preserving instrument” (Sapir, 1933/1949). Group stories function not only to maintain community values among their members but also to instill those values in the young (Gates, 1989). In some cultures, telling stories about the mythic origins or history of the group is even institutionalized as part of the formal preparation for adult roles and responsibilities (Herdt, 1981). Thus, the socializing power of sacred and traditional narrative is widely recognized. More than 60 years ago Malinowski (1926/1984) wrote,

The present essay focuses on a type of narrative that has received less attention with respect to its socializing potential, namely the informal, mundane, and often pervasive narrative accounts that people give of their personal experiences.

The remembered self can refer to memory of past concepts of self or to the way memory of the past structures and changes present construal of self. These two senses of the remembered self no doubt interact to give shape and definition to the present self, but a full discussion of both aspects would be more than I could accomplish in a short essay. Consequently, I want to confine the present discussion to the way memory of the past structures and changes present self-construal. Students of the self only vaguely understand this process. Probably the best articulations of the relation between memory and self grow out of work in narrative psychology (see Bruner, 1990; Howard, 1991; Spence, 1982; Viederman, 1979). From the perspective of a narrative psychologist, selves are construed through autobiographical narrating. Starting with the observation that people engage continuously in the interpretation of present and past experiences, narrative psychologists contend that this interpretation takes the form of story telling. For them, the self plays the role of both protagonist and narrator in these stories, and through these roles, people come to terms with who and what they are.

Memory contributes to self-actualizing narrative telling because it serves as the raw material for the narrative. As raw material, memories do not constitute the self. Without the interpretive molding provided by narrative telling, memories would have little chance of being much more than unconnected bits of information. My recollections of past jobs, loves, and tragedies are each fairly meaningless memories unless they can be placed in a larger context.

Accuracy implies correspondence between what is remembered and an earlier state of affairs in the world. There are two influential points of view that assume that memory is not, or cannot, be accurate. The first, essentially a postmodern view of the world (see Gergen, chap. 5 of this volume), rejects the possibility of correspondence between memory and the event remembered on the grounds that there is no single valid interpretation of the original event against which to attempt a match. By this view, past realities are always being constructed anew and any match is illusory. Another view grants that a kind of accuracy is possible – events may leave a record – but still rejects any simple correspondence model. Memory is seen as a process of reconstruction, not reappearance (Bartlett, 1932; Neisser, 1967). By this view, it is highly unlikely that remembering will be entirely faithful to the original event. There may be occasional correspondence, or accurate remembering, but normal remembering is dynamic. Still, no matter how passive or dynamic one's theory of memory function, it would be very surprising from an evolutionary standpoint if our memories had little to do with the events in our past at all.

Several independent lines of thought come together in this book. The first of these is an ecological/cognitive analysis of the self that was initially proposed by one of us (Ulric Neisser) in 1988. Five different sources of self-relevant information were identified in that analysis and described in terms of the different “selves” that they establish. The “ecological” and “interpersonal” selves, based on perception, have been considered in a preceding volume called The Perceived Self. The “private” and “conceptual” selves will be the subject of a volume currently in preparation. Here we are concerned with what was initially called the “temporally extended” self-that is, with memory and the self-narrative.

The second group of ideas that animates this book comes from recent studies of memory development. The research of the last few years, including our own (Robyn Fivush), has made it obvious that remembering does not just happen. Instead it is a skill that must be learned, a socially motivated activity with a specific developmental history in early childhood. This means that the remembering self has a course of development too, one that is explored in several of these chapters.

Our third theme is one of the more prominent currents in late 20th-century intellectual life. The concept of narrative has recently become important across a surprisingly wide range of disciplines. The seven fields listed on the contributor information page of the Journal of Narrative and Life History – anthropology, education, folklore studies, linguistics, literary criticism, psychology, and sociology – are just the tip of the iceberg; history, philosophy, and theology are among many that could be added.

Research on nonliterate societies reveals striking examples of “amnesia”: Prior events or beliefs that contradict current ideas and values are either erased from the collective memory or altered so as to be consistent with present understandings (Goody & Watt, 1968; Henige, 1980; Ong, 1982; Packard, 1980). For example, when the British arrived in Ghana in the early part of this century, they found that the state of Gonja was divided into seven territories, each ruled by its own chief (Goody & Watt, 1968). When British authorities asked them to explain their system, the Gonja revealed that the founder of their state, Ndewura Jakpa, had fathered seven sons. Jakpa divided the land so that each son ruled one territory. The British preserved this account of the history of Gonja in their written records. Shortly after the British arrived, two of the seven states in Gonja disappeared as a result of changes in boundaries. Sixty years later, oral historians again recorded the myths of state. In the updated version, Ndewura Jakpa begot only five sons; the Gonja made no mention of the founders of the two territories that had vanished from the scene. Oral historians have observed similar instances of forgetting or altering inconvenient aspects of the past in many other nonliterate societies (Goody & Watt, 1968).

In literate societies, individuals also revise history, especially in response to changing knowledge and political regimes (Greenwald, 1980). People interpret the past in terms of the present and therefore “every generation rewrites its history” (Mead, 1929/1964, p. 351). Because the earlier records are often preserved, people may notice differences between current and previous accounts of the past (Goody & Watt, 1968; Ong, 1982).

We are all the authors of our own autobiographies. We all tell stories about our past experiences both to ourselves and to others. These stories serve many different functions, such as entertainment, interpersonal bonding, and moral lessons. But one of the most important functions they serve is self-definitional. The stories of our lives tell us and our listeners something about who we are (Brewer, 1986; Fivush, 1988; Miller, Potts, Fung, Hoogstra, & Mintz, 1990; Neisser, 1988). Moreover, life stories seem to conform to canonical narratives, at least in Western cultures (Bruner, 1987; Labov, 1982; Spence, 1982). Canonical narratives give a particular form and meaning to our lives. Specifically, narratives provide a linear and often causal structure to life events. Good narratives are not simple chains of actions following an arbitrary temporal order; narratives are emotionally meaningful, causally connected sequences of actions that provide both temporal and evaluative cohesion to life events. Particular events become important parts of our life story because they provide some meaningful information about who we are, and the narrative forms for representing and recounting these events provide a particular structure for understanding and conveying this meaning. Moreover, as I will argue later, it is the evaluative and emotional aspects of life stories that link these experiences to the continuously developing sense of self.

In this chapter, I examine ways in which personal experiences come to be represented in conventionalized narrative and evaluative forms from a developmental perspective. The guiding assumption of the argument is that young children are socialized to represent their experiences in particular ways through participating in adult-guided conversations about the past.

Willem Wagenaar's study (chap. 10 of this volume) represents an excellent example of the value of carefully planned and meticulously collected naturalistic data. Because of the quality of his earlier study, he was able to readdress the data to consider whether his memory was biased against events that cast him in an unfavorable light. The data suggest that exactly the opposite is the case, and allow a range of alternative hypotheses to be firmly rejected. I myself am convinced by this analysis, even though the pattern of observations is exactly the opposite to what one might have predicted on the basis of common wisdom, and indeed considerable data (see Baddeley, 1990, pp. 379–406, for a review). I do, however, have some misgivings over the extent to which these findings would generalize, and even more concern over Wagenaar's theoretical interpretation of them.

As Wagenaar himself emphasizes, an inevitable limitation on single-case studies is the question of generality. Despite this danger, single-case studies in neuropsychology have typically proved to generalize, and have been justifiably influential. Is there any reason to suspect that the present study will be any less general? I think there may be. Many authors have suggested that there are major differences in the ways in which individuals cope with threatening or conflicting information, with some tending to minimize such evidence (repressors) while others tend to focus on the discrepancy (sensitizers) (Byrne, 1964; Davis, 1990). One would therefore like to see a number of equally well designed studies on other subjects before generalizing too widely from these findings. Such a concern is reinforced when one considers possible alternative mechanisms that might have produced the results obtained.

Many years ago an unmanageable adolescent by the name of Samuel Clemens took leave of what he described as his “stupid, know-nothin'” father. Several years later, when the famous American humorist had returned home as a young adult after weathering the world on his own for a while, Mark Twain was, again in his own words, “astonished to find out how much the old man had learned in those few years.” Episodes such as this stand not only as amusing testaments to predictable developmental trajectories, but also as subtle reminders that autobiographical memories necessarily follow personal pathways, pathways constituted in the very act of self-construction. Even as we forge notions of our “selves,” we shape and frame the nature of our later recollections. Our identities and memories are two sides of the same coin (Greenwald & Banaji, 1989).

This paper addresses the constructive and reconstructive aspects of autobiographical memory broadly, placing particular emphasis on the interdependence between memory recall and the continuously evolving self. It follows Robinson's (1976) definition of an autobiographical memory as a personal “record of discrete experiences arising from a person's participation in acts or situations which were to some degree localized in time and place” (p. 578). The central features of this definition are shared by other, more recent descriptions, such as Neisser's (1988, p. 361) characterization of autobiographical memory as “the form of memory in which the events of one's life comprise the significant memoria” (cf. Brewer's 1986 definition of personal memory).

Dualities in experience have a way of becoming dichotomies in psychological theory. What nature has linked, usually in an intricate and marvelous pattern of covariation, science often rends asunder. Scientists then find themselves deeply perplexed over problems of their own creation.

The greatest mistake in modern psychology is to treat the self-in-its-world as a self separated from its surroundings. Cognitivism, with its allegiance to the representational theory of the mind and its focus on the metaphor of mental states as internal to the mind, is particularly susceptible to this dualistic separation of self from environment. Almost all modern accounts of cognitions simply assume that cognition is a process within individuals, a process that may or may not represent the world adequately. Modern theories of memory have been affiliated with this internalist school, treating remembering as the registering, maintenance, and retrieval of internalized states. These naive assumptions not only lead to problems in understanding cognition and memory, but also tend to prevent theorists from forming an adequate conception of the individual self who is the cognizer or rememberer.

The ecological approach to cognition which I have been developing treats cognition as a process in which the individual self encounters and maintains contact with the surrounding environment, including other individuals in that environment (Reed, 1987, 1988, 1991, 1993). From this ecological point of view, memory is not just a rearousal of internal states, but is a special form of encountering the environment. Through memory, we not only encounter the past environment, but more importantly, we keep in contact with our past selves in their surroundings.

This discussion is based on the assumption that a consideration of the emotional basis of self-understanding will lead to a better appreciation of the role of personal narratives in self-construction. Recently, there has been a great deal of attention paid to the role of emotionality in personality and self-concept development. For example, Watson and Clark (in press) have delineated the emotional core of extroversion in adults. Emde (1983) and Stern (1985) have suggested that early affective experiences form a core around which children organize their representations of themselves and their world. Eder and Mangelsdorf (in press) suggest that this underlying emotionality is a complex construct that is derived from the interaction between infant temperament, parental personality, and the infant-caregiver attachment relationship.

Emotionality is distinct from emotion and affect in several ways. First, it describes nonspecific affects (e.g., the presence or absence of positive affects), as opposed to the specific affects (e.g., anger, fear, sadness) that are usually called “emotion.” Second, emotionality is relatively long-term and is thus distinct from affect, which is often associated with short-term mood fluctuations. Third, the terms emotion and affect usually describe states, whereas emotionality is viewed as a trait.

Emotionality is often conceived of as a somewhat primitive feeling of self that can exist prior to the ability to assign linguistic labels to one's feelings (e.g., Tellegen, 1985; Watson & Clark, in press). In fact, Stern (1985) has suggested that the ability to describe these early feelings of self may radically alter the nature of self-knowledge. One function of the self-concept is to explain (and perhaps rationalize) one's emotionality.

Human beings exist through time, just as everything else does: One thing happens after another. But unlike anything else, people remember what happened to them – some of it, anyway. This is a remarkable achievement. The remarkable thing is not just that past events influence the present (which happens in all biological systems) but that they are explicitly reconstructed by the person who experienced them. By definition, such reconstructions are examples of episodic memory. If the remembered event seems to have played a significant part in the life of the rememberer, it becomes an example of autobiographical memory and may form part of a life narrative. Life narratives are significant because they are one way of defining the self.

This book has two goals: to explore the relations between remembering and the self, and to see those relations in proper perspective. Life narratives are often described as if they were the chief or even the only ingredient of the self: “They [life narratives] are the basis of personal identity and self-understanding and they provide answers to the question ‘Who am I?’ ” (Polkinghorne, 1991, p. 136). This claim goes too far: Self-knowledge depends on perception, conceptualization, and private experience as well as narrative (Neisser, 1988). Self-narratives are a basis but not the basis of identity. It is appropriate, then, that the present volume is only one of a series devoted to self-knowledge and the self. An earlier book (Neisser, 1993a) was concerned with ecological and interpersonal perception; the self-concept will be considered in a subsequent volume.

However important those other sources of self-knowledge may be, they are not our focus here.