Rewriting the Self

History, Memory, Narrative

Mark Freeman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317379638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Originally published in 1993. This book explores the process by which individuals reconstruct the meaning and significance of past experience. Drawing on the lives of such notable figures as St Augustine, Helen Keller and Philip Roth as well as on the combined insights of psychology, philosophy and literary theory, the book sheds light on the intricacies and dilemmas of self-interpretation in particular and interpretive psychological enquiry more generally.

The author draws upon selected, mainly autobiographical, literary texts in order to examine concretely the process of rewriting the self. Among the issues addressed are the relationship of rewriting the self to the concept of development, the place of language in the construction of selfhood, the difference between living and telling about it, the problem of facts in life history narrative, the significance of the unconscious in interpreting the personal past, and the freedom of the narrative imagination.

Alpha Sigma Nu National Book Award winner in 1994

1 Rewriting the self

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674599-1

To be Mindful of Life

I begin this introductory chapter, along with each of the chapters to follow, with a life. My reasons for doing so are straightforward. First and foremost, it seems to me to make good sense to ground what are ultimately some very difficult issues concerning human life in life itself. But this is not how things are most often done in contemporary academic psychology.

I learned this early on. Like so many others, then and now, I entered college in pursuit of deep truths about the human condition. For a variety of reasons, I had found myself prone to self-reflection, to trying to make sense of the world and my own possible place in it. At the time, largely as a function of my own naivete, I’m afraid, I couldn’t imagine a better way to further this project than to become a psychology major. I didn’t really know anything about psychology, I should mention, other than what I had heard about it informally over the years, but as far as I could tell it was the place for me. Like so many others again, I had proceeded essentially by way of elimination: I liked reading books well enough, but the study of literature, as I had come to know it anyway, with its belabored attempt to pick apart perfectly good stories, struck me as tedious. As for philosophy, which I had only encountered in snippets, it seemed too dry and too serious for my liking. I wanted to learn about people, everyday people like you and me, and I couldn’t quite manage to find them there. And so, to make a long story short, psychology it was.

It wasn’t long after experiencing some of the standard fare – introductory psychology, learning, statistics, and so on – that it started becoming painfully clear that psychology wasn’t quite what I thought it was. It was interesting sometimes, and even enjoyable every now and then (in much the same way that tinkering with machines can be), but my spirit was left hungry for something more. I began to gain a glimpse of what this something was in two courses taken during my junior year, one in ‘visual thinking’, given in the psychology department, and another in ‘phenomenological psychology’, given in philosophy. Heady stuff. But I felt that I had finally found some semblance of a niche for myself. It was a bit marginal, I realized, and it was still unclear how much Husserl and Heidegger I would want to hack through in the years to come, but it was no small relief to learn that psychology did indeed have a place for human beings. I was determined to make a go of it.

Little did I know at the time how few universities would permit me to do so. By most indications, this is still the case. It is a remarkable – and remarkably ironic – situation, and my only hope is that some day in the future an historian of the discipline will be able to gaze back in shock at the utter silliness of so much of it. The situation is of course a tragic one as well, both for those students who remain thoroughly dumbfounded by the discipline and, more importantly, for those ‘research subjects’ whose lives, whether exemplary of the heights to which we sometimes ascend or the depths to which we sink, remain uncharted and untouched.

As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, eager to make a dent in the monolith of academic psychology, with its frightening numbers and its cold anonymity, I commenced my work in the spirit of negation, my primary aim being to battle theory with theory. Perhaps for the sake of redeeming those lost souls who had stumbled through mainstream psychology as I had, I wanted to help change the face of the discipline, to make it fit for human habitation. It was terrifically exciting. Not only was I diving headlong into the dense thickets of psychological theory, but I was lucky enough to study with the philosopher Paul Ricoeur; his courses, ‘The phenomenology of time consciousness’, ‘Historicity, history, and narrative’, and several others, sent my intellectual spirit soaring. They were formative years, to say the least.

There was an odd irony to some of what I was doing, however. In the midst of this all-out assault on the mainstream, this desperate, heartfelt attempt to inject a measure of life into what I saw to be an all too lifeless discipline, I became complicitous in its profound tendency toward abstraction, my work serving as little more in some instances than a sort of inverted mirror image of the problems I wished to correct. The work was acceptable – thoughtful, meticulous, and so on – and even now I can only presume that this is what had to be done at the time (there often being little reason to chastise oneself through hindsight), but I came to feel there was something missing.

What was telling was that except for those who were immersed in similar projects, particularly those who found in ‘hermeneutics’ – which, for now, we can think of simply as theory of interpretation¹ – a new vision of psychology, it was hard for people to get a handle on what this work was all about. Members of my family, for instance, who were interested in learning just what exactly I had been doing all these years, read my earliest essays, which I had proudly sent their way, only to be largely befuddled by all of the lengthy, unfamiliar words. Now I am not so much of a populist as to suppose that everyone should immediately become enthralled with every last word I write, but something was wrong here, particularly in light of the fact that my stated goal was one of humanizing the discipline. So, where were the humans?

What follows is no less philosophically-oriented than any of my previous work. Nor am I about to tell you that there is something here for everyone; it would be sheer delusion on my part to assume so. The fact of the matter is, this book is irrevocably about certain fundamental intellectual issues, issues that are part and parcel of ‘the life of the mind’. But what I have come to believe in recent years, even amidst the welter of theories and metatheories and methodologies that have sought to set psychology along with its allied disciplines aright, is that the life of the mind in no way excludes being mindful of life. Indeed, the one is not possible without the other. In what follows, therefore, I will indeed try to be mindful of life, precisely by inquiring into the lives of a number of people (five of whom either were or are quite real, one of whom is fictional) who will help us to understand that particular issue which is at the forefront of this work, namely, rewriting the self: the process by which one’s past and indeed oneself is figured anew through interpretation.

Interpretation and Selfhood

Why this emphasis on interpretation? The reason is actually quite simple in some ways. When we deal with phenomena in the physical world – bolts of lightning, rock formations, the movement of clouds across the sky – we do not ordinarily seek to interpret them, in the sense of trying to understand their possible meaning. We can certainly attempt to explain these phenomena and we can also explore them for their beauty and their wonder, but as a general rule we refrain from ‘reading’ them for their meaning or their significance. Now ‘we’, it should be noted, by no means includes the whole of humanity. There are in fact people who do interpret these phenomena, who see them animated with either human or godly intention or with the very pulse of life itself. Perhaps there is some wisdom in this too: rather than looking out at a fundamentally separate, inert, and accidental world, they may see instead an extension of their own being, alive and purposeful. Be that as it may, my best guess is that most of those who are reading this book don’t think of the non-human world in quite this way.

The human world, however, seems to be a bit different. This is not to say that there aren’t aspects of this world that are rather like bolts of lightning in their own right, calling more for explanation than interpretation; we ourselves, as parts of nature, have things going on inside us that are indeed essentially meaning-less. There is hardly any reason, for instance, to interpret the daily churning of our digestive systems or the firing of our synapses. If we were to assume the role of scientist, of course, we would certainly have to interpret our findings about these phenomena – nothing explains itself – but we would no doubt still refrain from reading them for their existential meaning and import. Once we move beyond these sorts of phenomena, though, once we commence the task of trying to make sense of what people are saying, of how they are acting, of how they are living their very lives, it becomes patently clear that dealing with these phenomena as if they were digestive systems or synapses won’t quite do. What is required instead is a process, an interpretive process, wherein we aim toward understanding what is said, acted, or lived.

I do not wish to erect too firm a line between explanation and understanding. The latter is sometimes in the service of the former, our initial attempts to make sense of things being geared toward answering why: Why did she say that? Why did he do that? Why have they chosen to live that way? Moreover, the former is sometimes in the service of the latter: upon determining why, we may find ourselves in the position to achieve a renewed understanding of the phenomena before us. In this respect, therefore, explanation and understanding, rather than being seen as opposed to one another, are perhaps better seen as different aspects, different ‘moments’, of the process of making sense of the human world.

Nor do I wish to erect too firm a line between what has been called the Naturwissenschaften, the natural sciences, and the Geisteswissenschaften, the ‘spirit’ or human sciences, as embodied especially in the humanities. If there is anything that has served to compromise and diminish the discipline of psychology over the course of the last century or so, it is its persistent difficulty in accommodating adequately nature and spirit – broadly taken – into its scope. Once it was decided that the discipline would do best to emulate the so-called hard sciences and to relegate the ‘softer’ aspects either to its unscientific margins or to the humanities, the stage was set for the future. Ne’er, therefore, the twain shall meet: either psychology is this or it is that. Human beings, meanwhile, are either reduced to objects like any other (which is to say dehumanized) or elevated into the status of the very gods they dethroned. For the sake of both the discipline and these human beings, we need to see if there are other ways to think about all this.

Integrative desires aside for the moment, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that there is no set of formulas or laws or axioms that can neatly and exhaustively account for the things that make us tick; much of human experience seems best characterized by a kind of essential secrecy and, strictly speaking, indeterminacy. Far from implying that interpretation is ultimately a grope in the dark, however, or that the knowledge it yields cannot help but be subjective or spurious, all this means is that given the beings we are – housed in language, in culture, in history – there is much about us that requires interpretation for sense to be made. To omit this glaringly obvious fact is thus to do a great disservice to the discipline and, more importantly, to who we are. Armed with this conviction, therefore, my foremost aim was to help clear a space in psychology for hermeneutic inquiry and to show that its ‘findings’, different though they may be from those to be found in research articles and the like, are nonetheless perfectly well-suited to contribute to our knowledge about human beings.

As for why I have elected to address the process of rewriting the self, the reason is actually quite simple here as well. For what I have come to believe is that there is no more appropriate or exciting arena for understanding what hermeneutic inquiry is – as concerns both its possibilities and its problems – than the exploration of that most unusual and elusive being we call the ‘self. In certain important respects, in fact, self-interpretation is a kind of limit case of the more general process of interpretation of which we have already spoken and may thus serve as a testing ground of sorts to determine its value and validity. Why is this so? When we try to interpret something outside of ourselves, be it a text or a painting or a person, there is something there before us: words or splashes of paint or actions. But what really is there when the object of our interpretive endeavors is ourselves? Our pasts, you might answer, the history of our words and deeds. But are these pasts, these histories, suitably compared to that which exists outside ourselves? They are our pasts, our histories, and are in that sense inseparable from who is doing the interpreting, namely ourselves: subject and object are one. We are thus interpreting precisely that which, in some sense, we ourselves have fashioned through our own reflective imagination.

Interpreting what exists outside ourselves is difficult enough. It involves a going-beyond what is, an effortful act of creating a context, a meaningful context, within which what is may be placed. What this means, of course, is that interpretation involves an inescapably subjective dimension as well as a dimension of essential contestability: strictly speaking, interpretations are neither true nor false, but better or worse, more or less valid. This, again, is one of the reasons why psychology has been so reluctant to include interpretation in its scope; for many, it reeks entirely too much of the subjective and the arbitrary, the unscientific. Aren’t these problems compounded still further, therefore, when the subject and the object of interpretation are one? Indeed they are. But this should not lead us to retreat from the task at hand. In fact, what I am suggesting here is that if we can make our way through this most thorny of hermeneutic inquiries, perhaps we will be in a better position to assess the worth of this mode of comprehending human lives and to defend it against the charges of its detractors.

There is another, more fundamental reason why I have elected to address the process of rewriting the self as well. For this very process, in addition to being an interpretive one through and through, is also a recollective one, in which we survey and explore our own histories, toward the end of making and remaking sense of who and what we are. What this means is that we will be doing significantly more in this book than inquiring into a discrete phenomenon that happens to be interesting in a ‘mindful of life’ way and potentially instructive for addressing certain fundamental concepts and problems in hermeneutics. We will in fact be inquiring into some of the very conditions of self-understanding – and indeed selfhood – that are woven into the fabric of contemporary life itself. More to the point still, my own conviction is that there is no better inroad into the phenomena of self-understanding and selfhood than this process we will be exploring here. We do, however, need to pursue in greater detail some of the risks that are involved.

Questions

Let me continue for a moment with my own narrative. I have already disclosed some of the reasons why I have chosen to pursue this project and why I have found it to be a particularly challenging and exciting one. From the very start of my thinking about it, I was firmly convinced that there was something unusually ‘real’ and important about it, that it might serve to break some new ground in the discipline. ‘You really seem to have a tiger by the tail’, one of my graduate school professors had told me. He too was convinced that the project was well worth pursuing. Not too long after I began in earnest to follow through on my plans, however, it became painfully clear that there were a great many questions that I would have to wrestle with to make the whole thing work. Now questions themselves, of course, are hardly something to fret over; they are what make intellectual life interesting. But what wound up happening, early on, was that these questions often assumed the form of challenges, serious challenges, to the very position I was interested in taking, which, again, had to do with carving out a valid space in psychology for hermeneutic inquiry in general and the process of rewriting the self in particular.

One of the main challenges I encountered is already implied in the project I have outlined above. Although I have said that I will be inquiring into lives, in a certain sense this is not quite right. For what we will have before us are not lives themselves, but rather texts of lives, literary artifacts that generally seek to recount in some fashion what these lives were like. In this respect, we will be – we must be – at least one step removed from the lives that we will be exploring: we can only proceed with our interpretive efforts on the basis of what has been written, by those whose lives they are.

This basic situation, I hasten to emphasize, obtains not only in the case of literary texts of the sort we will be examining here, but in the case of interviews and the like along with the observation of human action more generally. Interviews, of the sort that social scientists often gather, are themselves texts, and while they may not have quite as much literary flourish as those we buy in bookstores, they are in their own right literary artifacts, taking the form of words, designed to give shape to some feature of experience. As for the observation of human action, the story is actually much the same: human action, which occurs in time and yields consequences the significance of which frequently extend beyond the immediate situation in which it takes place, is itself a kind of text; it is a constellation of meanings which, not unlike literary texts or interviews, calls forth the process of interpretation (see especially Ricoeur 1981). In any case, the long and short of this brief excursion into ‘textuality’ is that our primary interpretive takeoff point will not be lives as such but the words used to speak them.

Now for some, particularly those of a skeptical bent, this situation may be extremely troubling. For if the ultimate interest is in fact in an enhanced understanding of human lives and not only in the words that are used to speak them, how exactly are we to move from the latter to the former? How, that is, are we to say anything cogent at all about lives themselves when all we have before us are texts? This is no minor problem, however academic it may seem on the face of it. Indeed, as Steiner (1989) has written, this ‘break of the covenant between word and world’, in addition to being ‘one of the very few revolutions of spirit in Western history’, ‘defines modernity itself’ (93).

No longer, therefore, can we complacently assume that texts provide windows on the world, that they refer to obdurate realities – ‘real presences’, Steiner calls them – ‘out there’, If texts refer to anything at all, it might be held, it is only to other texts, this chain of ‘intertextuality’ being endless, infinite; and what this implies, in turn, is that there may really be no ‘lives’ apart from this infinite play of language itself. If in fact, with the exception of our preverbal years, everything we do, everything we are, is bathed in language to begin with, isn’t ‘life’ itself another link in the chain of texts?

But let us assume, for argument’s sake, that there still remains some wisdom in the common parlance and that we can, cautiously, speak of human lives themselves. Right away, there is a further problem to be addressed. We noted that we would be dealing with texts that generally seek to recount the lives of their authors. Doesn’t this mean that the situation at hand is complicated still further? Texts of immediate experience may be troubling enough. But doesn’t the fact that we will be dealing for the most part with recollections of experience place us yet another step removed from the lives we wish to understand? Consider the countless distortions and falsifications to which recollections are subject. Consider as well that even ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Rewriting the self
• 2 The story of a life
• 3 In the name of the self
• 4 Living to tell about it
• 5 Fact and fiction
• 6 The primal scenes of selfhood
• 7 Who to become
• Toward a poetics of life history
• Notes
• References
• Name index
• Subject index