In short, autobiographical memory is best taken with a grain of salt. The self that is remembered today is not the historical self of yesterday, but only a reconstructed version. A different version - a new remembered self- may be reconstructed tomorrow. How different? I myself am biased toward continuity, and tend to think of most remembered selves as fairly stable from one day to the next. Perhaps my bias is predictable: don't psychologists always hope to find order in behavior? In any event, it is not a universal preference. Many literary accounts of human nature are very different: chaotic, mysterious, full of surprises. The contrast be-tween these attitudes can be very sharp. In Daniel Albright's memorable phrase (chap. 2 of this volume), "Literature is a wilderness, psychology is a garden."
Albright's chapter 2, which I hope you will read next, is a tour de force - one of the most original contributions ever made to a symposium on memory. It begins with what he calls "the brokenness of memory." The remembered self is radically incomplete; it "begins and ends in a state of nothingness, and from beginning to end is riddled with nothing-ness." Childhood amnesia - "Alzheimer's other disease" - is only its most obvious gap: The self might be better called "oblivious" than "remember-ing." Rememberers must gloss over vast empty spaces, like the miles be-tween unconnected bits of a great Chinese Wall. Yet oblivion is not always undesirable: On the contrary, it establishes a kind of absolute freedom that memory denies.
Albright is suspicious of the unity and coherence implied by the word self. We are more plural than that, divided against ourselves, discontinu-ous. "The human self is crazily mutable; my face may seem impassive, but beneath the calm exterior I am shifting, shifting, shifting, growing unrecognizable from moment to moment" (sec. 2). Albright is not the only contributor to this volume who emphasizes the multiplicity of the self. The same theme turns up in several other chapters, including Ed-ward Reed's concluding comparison between memory and perception (chap. 15). Where perceiving is an essentially unitary act (at any given time, each individual is embedded in the environment in one particular way and perceives exactly that), memory is always dual. Reed describes autobiographical memory as "the me-experiencing-now becoming aware of a prior-me-experiencing its (prior) environment." This is exactly the duality of the remembering and the remembered self.
We met the remembering and remembered selves earlier in this chap-ter. It is time now to meet their more famous cousins, the / and the me.
These concepts were first introduced by William James (1890) and later elaborated by G. H. Mead (1934). / is the subject himself/herself. In Mead's analysis / is the doer; it is always the / who acts or speaks or knows anything. The me, in contrast, is just something known by the /. Essen-tially, it is a (socially generated) mental representation of the self. Many aspects of the me are included in what I have elsewhere called the concep-tual self (Neisser, 1988), but others with a more narrative form constitute the remembered self. In this context the / is the remembering self, inven-tor and constructor of the remembered me. But here too, Albright en-riches our thinking. He argues that we can also reverse these definitions, regarding the remembered self as the inventor and the present self as its continuing invention. Is he not now the (albeit imperfectly realized) object that was intended long ago by the young Dan Albright?
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