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4 - Autobiographical remembering: Narrative constraints on objectified selves
- Edited by David C. Rubin, Duke University, North Carolina
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- Book:
- Remembering our Past
- Published online:
- 14 October 2009
- Print publication:
- 26 January 1996, pp 94-126
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Summary
The general purposes of this essay are as follows: First, to outline an ecological model of autobiographical remembering by examining the purposes, processes, and products of reconstructing meaningful memories. Second, to argue that autobiographical remembering is embedded in affective, interpersonal, sociocultural, and historical contexts. Improvized selves are created in present contexts to serve psychosocial, cultural, and historical purposes, and third, to demonstrate essential constraints on the construction of coherent personal narratives that give meaning and purpose to our everyday lives.
The specific aim of this essay is to illustrate that the subjective experiences of trauma and atrocity often lack the essential narrative elements needed to give coherence to those experiences as well as affectively grounded evaluative information. Evaluations of experiences give meaning to our lives. Evaluative information leads to culturally recognized coherent stories structured by known canonical narrative forms because affect conveys how subjective experiences should be interpreted and understood. On this view, autobiographical memories that are the essence of one's personal history can appear as coherent or incoherent to others to the extent others are familiar with the narrative structure used to reconstruct the past and the coherence inherent in autobiographical memories associated with the temporal and evaluative structure of those recollections.
I claim that autobiographical experiences that cannot be reconstructed and shared through spoken or written language, music, movement (e.g., dance), art, literature, or science precipitate feelings of existential stress because articulated deep motivations cannot be related intimately to others.
4 - Composing protoselves through improvisation
- Edited by Ulric Neisser, Emory University, Atlanta, Robyn Fivush, Emory University, Atlanta
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- Book:
- The Remembering Self
- Published online:
- 04 August 2010
- Print publication:
- 28 October 1994, pp 55-77
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Summary
This is a theoretical essay about cognitive, emotional, social, and cultural activities that work together to create remembered selves through autobiographical remembering. It is not an essay about an abstraction – The Self. Instead, it is about selves that are grounded in, but emerge through productive remembering and productive interacting in, everyday life (Barclay & Smith, 1992). Such remembered selves are part of our phenomenal experiences of the individual; they are often shared and formed in interpersonal relationships. Remembered selves serve contemporary adaptive purposes, deriving their meaning in the seemingly mundane activities of daily living. What becomes one's remembered self at any particular moment is a gestalt composed and objectified in constructed and reconstructed “personal” and generic memories (Brewer, 1986; Pillemer, 1990). These memories have acquired personal and cultural significance through socially structured activities and transactions between people in face-to-face encounters. On this view, a contemporary remembered self is not a collection of debris haphazardly gathered up from various mental compartments that presumably reflect the compartmentalization of modern life into family, career, or leisure activities. Like Grene (1993), I prefer to think of a remembered self as being inseparable from a “historical self” such that memories are not fleeting fragments of a past more forgotten than remembered, but recollections that are part of a perceived pattern to one's life.
The essay is in four main sections. A theoretical overview is presented first, along with my purpose and position regarding the nature of the remembered self.
4 - Ordinary everyday memories: Some of the things of which selves are made
- Edited by Ulric Neisser, Eugene Winograd
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- Book:
- Remembering Reconsidered
- Published online:
- 25 March 2010
- Print publication:
- 24 June 1988, pp 91-125
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Summary
This chapter is organized in three major sections. A brief review of our previous research is presented first. Next, new findings regarding the nature of self-selected events and memory for those events are reported. This section is based on the diaries of four women who kept written records of memorable daily events. Two recognition-memory posttests were given following 2 weeks of record keeping. On each posttest, original records were presented for verification, together with foil items. Foils derived from the participants' actual records were designed to show that the meaning of daily events is preserved in personal memories. This section includes an ethnographic-type description of self-selected daily events and activities. The accidental and tragic death of the parent of one of these women unfortunately occurred during data collection. Because she and another participant were both keeping records at the time of the accident, we were able to investigate the impact of a highly significant life experience on memory for everyday events in a controlled case study.
Introduction
The content of much human cognition is represented as a rich collection of autobiographical memories. Certainly, some of these memories are of formative life experiences, although many more appear as insignificant happenings. If these seemingly unimportant, ordinary everyday memories are considered alone, or isolated from the mosaic of one's personal recollections, they may be interpreted as trivial fragments of the past, but in the context, flow, and rhythm of daily life they become the fabric of a self-knowledge system.
6 - Schematization of autobiographical memory
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- By Craig R. Barclay, Graduate School of Education and Human Development, University of Rochester
- Edited by David C. Rubin, Duke University, North Carolina
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- Book:
- Autobiographical Memory
- Published online:
- 01 March 2011
- Print publication:
- 26 September 1986, pp 82-99
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Summary
Introduction
The issues addressed in this chapter reflect concerns about the nature and acquisition of everyday autobiographical memories. One view is that such memories represent life events as those events actually happened; there is little change in what is remembered with the passage of time and as different experiences accumulate – most autobiographical memories have distinct, enduring, and episodic qualities (Tulving, 1972). I assume instead that (a) most autobiographical memories are reconstructions of past episodic events (Bartlett, 1932), (b) these recollections are driven by self-schemata (Markus, 1977), and (c) such self-schemata are acquired through a schematization process of one's memories for routine and often mundane everyday events and activities (Freud, 1914/1960; Piaget & Inhelder, 1973). If most autobiographical memories are reconstructions, then they are not often exact in detail even though these memories are true in the sense of maintaining the integrity and gist of past life events. Although many of the generic properties of one's autobiographical memories may change only gradually or with the occurrence of some socially significant transition, the elaborations of specific events probably vary over time, and those elaborations could be affected by one's current self-knowledge base.