Jerome Bruner (1986, 1990) is psychology's most eloquent advocate of the narrative mode. Nevertheless, he is keenly aware of the ambiguities involved. In chapter 3, Bruner specifically rejects the term "remembered self." For one thing, actual self-narratives are not so dependent on mem-ory as it implies. "The crucial cognitive activities involved in self-construction seem much more like 'thinking' than 'memory'" (sec. 1). For another thing, there is the multiplicity of the selves that we remember. Self-narratives vary from one occasion to the next, one audience to the next, one mood to the next. Moreover, they are always shaped by implicit theories of narrative and narration. It is because of those theories, for example, that crucial turning points so often appear in life narratives -probably much more often than in life itself. Bruner also introduces an-other important concept, one that students of false sexual-abuse memo-ries may find especially useful. Conceptions of narrative often lead us to emphasize our own "agency" (the effect of choices we made ourselves), but they can occasionally produce "victimicy" as well. That is, sometimes the best life narrative is one in which we seem to be the helpless victim of choices made by someone else.
Bruner and Albright and Reed are not the only ones with reservations about the singleness of the self. Such reservations are expressed even more strongly by Craig Barclay in chapter 4. Barclay, a longtime student of the vicissitudes of memory, is especially concerned with the affective aspects of recall. "Remembrances that become selves are pregnant with meanings: Meanings are bound together by the emotional life of individ-uals interconnected with the lives of others." In addition, Barclay empha-sizes that autobiographical remembering is typically a matter of skillful improvisation rather than direct retrieval. The results of these improvisations are protoselves, selves in the making, new on every occasion, innova-tively adapted to the present circumstances and emotional needs of the individual.
In chapter 5, Kenneth Gergen goes even further than Barclay in em-phasizing the importance of social context. He begins by describing two extreme positions in the study of memory. For what he calls psychological essentialism, memory is a self-contained process within the mind (or the brain). This is, indeed, the underlying assumption of most modern mem-ory research. Such research has been productive in many ways, but it has little to say about the issues discussed in this volume (e.g., about the accu-racy of recall). The other position is that of textual essentialism. For post-modern thinkers like Barthes and Foucault, only texts matter; "person" and "self" are not even useful categories. Although I myself have never understood how to take this view seriously, Gergen apparently does. Therefore, he sees a need to compromise between these two alternatives. To this end he proposes social constructionism, a position in which "ac-counts of memory gain their meaning through their usage, not within the mind nor within the text but within social relationships."
Gergen is probably the leading psychological exponent of postmodern epistemology, so his willingness to make such a compromise - even to find a place for "the kinds of experimental explorations that have been the hallmarks of psychology as a science" (chap. 5) - is important. In a roughly reciprocal way, I hope to find a place (in my own ecological/ cognitive framework) for social constructionist accounts of the self. Many selections in this book can be seen as attempts to do just that. Neverthe-less, no theory based only on social process and socially constructed mem-ory can do full justice to self-knowledge. People are perceivers as well as rememberers. At all times we can directly see (and hear and feel) where we are and what we are doing; even whether we are socially engaged (Neisser, 1993b). However accurately or inaccurately we may recall or reconstruct the past, this/here/now is the present state of affairs for us. On the other hand, perception and the present are not always the individu-al's most important concern. Wherever we happen to be here and now, we can still be caught up in some compelling memory from long ago and far away. Like it or not, then, self-knowledge is intrisically multimodal. It cannot be reduced to any single source of information.
Given the constructive nature of social recall, one might expect to find wide individual differences in its constructions. Do some people remem-ber their experiences more fully than others? Vary their accounts more freely from one social setting to the next? Bias them in a more self-serving way? Construct different kinds of narratives about them? There has been surprisingly little work on these questions, but Greg Neimeyer and April Metzler make a good start in chapter 6. They focus on a dimension of individual difference that is particularly applicable to young people of college age, a dimension that derives from the work of Erik Eriksen. At any given point in time, a person may be in one of four "identity statuses" (Marcia, 1966). Diffuse individuals do not have stable commitments to any set of values; Foreclosed individuals have committed themselves prema-turely; Moratorium and Achieved individuals are actively seeking self-relevant information to establish or confirm such commitments. In Neimeyer and Metzler's computer-controlled experiment, subjects from the two information-oriented groups generated the most autobiographi-cal memories while Diffuse subjects produced the fewest. There were also specific patterns across groups in the recall of positive and negative ex-periences, as well as in the impact of memories that discontinued the subject's own self-perceptions.
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