GILLETT / NARRATIVE ACCOUNT OF IDENTITY ■ 23 Schechtman’s Narrative Account of Identity Grant Gillett KEYWORDS: personal identity, narrative self, memory shame, pride, aspiration, vulnerability, and that crucial sense of who one is as a person among others. I It follows that here we might also find the HAVE LONG BEEN AN ADMIRER of Schechtman’s source of the discontents that induce a person to sensitive and psychologically realistic account apply to a psychiatrist or counselor for help with of personal identity. In the present piece, she the narrative work required to fashion a liveable addresses the issues surrounding personal identi- self. If Schechtman is right, the cognitive capaci- ty through Locke’s view and problems attending ties contributing to memory and “keeping track that view and the psychological continuity theo- of oneself”(in a deep and satisfying way) are to ries descended from it. be found in part in the nonconscious domain She examines the claim that the person is rather than the thin layer of consciousness and more extensive than the conscious mind and in- propositional attitude psychology that enters the cludes aspects of nonconscious mental activity. mind of an analytic philosopher or a psychiatrist Schechtman argues that one must have a self- uninterested in depth. conception that includes a trajectory where I think she is right and that this paper and her present experience unfolds meaningfully out of more extensive work on the constitution of self one’s past replete with implications for what one represent a fertile point at which psychiatrists does and how one does it. She locates, in current and psychotherapists can begin the task of un- writing on the self, the idea of a perceiver or derstanding the nature of identity and the chal- narrator self who tries to make sense out of lenges involved in finding one that will serve the herself as a human being with certain thoughts unfolding project of understanding and forming and feelings and is sometimes at a loss to do so. the self. I believe that the resources that individu- To this potentially very rich starting point we als need for this task are derived from one’s need only add the fact that a person draws on rootedness in culture and human relationships discursive and narrative skills that have been where the levels of self that support conscious- inscribed in her being to do this narrative, edito- ness can be nurtured according to what Michel rial, and judicial task and that many of these Foucault calls the techniques proper to the care skills have been imbibed with mother’s milk (and of the self. Schechtman has done us a favor in father’s voice). From this discursively inscribed taking the debates surrounding neo-Lockean set of resources and orientations arise guilt, © 2005 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 24 ■ PPP / VOL. 12, NO. 1 / MARCH 2005 views of personal identity and outlining a per- of the human psyche as it roams through the spective on identity and memory that can lead us jungle/jumble of discursive life and tries to nour- to develop our understanding of the complexity ish itself on what it finds there.