These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
The US psychologist Jerome
Bruner believed that narratives were
important for the creation of the self. We have a strong feeling
that we are a particular "i" (our identity): where does it come from?
At the same time, we are capable of turning sensory input into a
"narrative": we not only catalog all the images, sounds, etc that we
perceive, we also organize them in "stories". It appears that there
is a biological need to "make sense" of our experience, and to structure
that sense into "narratives". Narratives seem to link our current
status to past events and future actions. One particular case of
narrative is the "autobiography": the story about myself. Is that the
cause or the effect of the "self"? Another particular case of
narratives is constituted by the narratives about others: as we organize their
actions in stories, we construct theories of their minds, of why they do what
they do. This separates the self from the non-self, and places the self in
relationship with other selves. Narratives are, inevitably,
subjective. They do not, and do not intend to, "duplicate" reality:
they internalize reality, they interpret reality from the vantage point of the
self. In a sense, therefore, our narratives "falsify" experience. In
fact, the self is a "perpetually rewritten story". The self that we
remember is the one we need to survive today. If that self does not
"work" anymore, we introduce a turning point in the narrative that
changes our self. Bruner believes in a multiplicity of
narratives. The only way that one can fuse the different chronological selves
of a life (from childhood to present) is by telling a story: all those selves
become characters of the story, the same way a novelist uses several characters
to create a plot. At the same time, the story that one fabricates is heavily
influenced by the stories that one has heard. One's culture creates the
templates that one uses in creating new stories. There is no single, static
remembered self. What we remember is influenced by social and cultural factors.
Self-narratives do not even depend so much on memory as on thinking. Bruner thinks that narratives are not
only an accident of nature but play an important role in creating our understanding
of the community and of ourselves. In other words, Bruner believes that
"making sense" (i.e., constructing meaning) is the fundamental
characteristic of our self-conscious life. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Self" | Back to the index of all chapters |