ABSTRACT
Over the last decades, the idea that human beings are characterized by a narrative nature has become increasingly popular. This perspective has more and more been adopted in many fields of investigation, including psychopathology. The underlying tenet is that, if someone lacks narrative abilities, something should be gone wrong. The mainstreaming idea is that personal identity is a kind of identity, and identity – after all – is a conceptual and linguistic matter. This perspective, however, is more controversial than one could expect. It will be argued that personal identity is not completely a matter of stories and storytelling. There is another way people shape their self, made up of psychological episodes and non-conceptual experiences. After having appreciated what exactly is the non-conceptual knowledge, it will be showed how people can authentically experience their inner life in a non-conceptual way and how this is equally physiological than all the conceptual manners one can conduct her life. Finally, it will be appreciated the meaning of this idea for the study of mental disorders.
