Philosophy
Personal Identity and Narrative Selfhood
Quick fact
Philosopher Marya Schechtman argues that personal identity is best understood not as a set of biological or psychological facts, but as the ongoing narrative we construct about our lives—a story we tell ourselves and others.
Why this is interesting
You are not the same person you were ten years ago—so what makes you 'you'? The secret might be the story you tell yourself.
Read the full explanation
Understanding Personal Identity and Narrative Selfhood
When you think about your own identity over time, what is it that connects the child you were, the person you are now, and the future self you imagine? The standard 'psychological continuity' view says it’s a chain of memories and overlapping mental states. But this view struggles to explain why a single life feels like one life, even when memories are forgotten. The narrative selfhood approach offers a different answer: you are the protagonist of a story. You (and others) narrate your life into a coherent plot with characters, motivations, and consequences. This narrative provides a unified sense of self, making your past actions part of the same ongoing story as your present and future. It’s not just about having memories—it’s about how those memories are woven into a meaningful whole.
A deeper explanation
The mechanism behind narrative selfhood is the active construction of a life story. This isn’t merely a passive record of events; it’s an ongoing interpretation that selects, emphasizes, and connects experiences. Philosophers like Paul Ricoeur and Marya Schechtman argue that this narrative structure is what makes a self a self—it gives us a framework for explaining our actions, understanding our relationships, and projecting ourselves into the future. For Schechtman, the narrative self is central to moral responsibility: we can be held accountable for actions that are part of our ongoing story, even if we’ve changed. The theory also helps explain the profound sense of disruption when someone loses their autobiographical memory—they lose the ability to integrate experiences into a single self. Yet challenges remain: cases of severe psychological discontinuity, like dissociative identity disorder, seem to create multiple narratives within one body, questioning whether narrative is a sufficient condition for personal identity. Nevertheless, narrative selfhood offers a powerful and intuitive account of what it means to have a self that persists through change.