ABSTRACT
Research in psychology has shown us that this is naive. Memories are not like snapshots or audiovisual recordings, to be accessed or played back. Memories are made, more literally than the idiom suggests. At any given moment, we are unconsciously selecting and reshaping our memories, often to make them fit with a story of our lives that we have come to accept as our true one, whether it is true or not. Marina Oshana develops the importance of autobiographical memory in a very particular way. Her observation ‘knowing who one is depends upon knowing what one has done’ is one many share. John Christman also develops the idea of the relational self. ‘Insofar as narratives depend for their meaning on their reflection of culturally located semiotics (meaning-bearing symbol systems),’ he writes, ‘then the person’s relation to her culture becomes central to who she is, and not central in the sense of “important” but central in the sense of “constituted by”’.
