Disentangling the self. A naturalistic approach to narrative self-construction

New Ideas in Psychology 40 (2016) 115e122

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New Ideas in Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/newideapsych

Disentangling the self. A naturalistic approach to narrative self-construction Massimo Marraffa a, *, 1, Alfredo Paternoster b a b

University of Rome “Roma Tre”, Department of Philosophy, Communication and Media Studies, Via Ostiense 234, 00144 Rome, Italy University of Bergamo, Department of Letters, Philosophy, Communication, via Pignolo 123, 24121 Bergamo, Italy

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 22 September 2014 Received in revised form 22 July 2015 Accepted 25 August 2015

In this article we explore the implications of a definition of self-consciousness as a process, by which we mean the self-representing of a multilevel system (the human organism). This sets the stage for a developmental story about how a narrative identity is progressively constructed from body awareness, which becomes bodily self-awareness between 18 and 24 months of age. The final outcome is an approach to narrative self-construction which, drawing on findings in developmental, dynamic, social and personality psychology, aims to distance itself from the hermeneutical and eliminativist forms of narrativism. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Bodily self-awareness Psychological self-awareness Defense mechanisms William James Narrative identity

In this paper, we argue that self-consciousness should be understood as a process. In particular, we propose that selfconsciousness be thought of as the process of constructing a cognitively demanding form of self (the “narrative self”) out of neurocognitive and psychosocial components. The approach underlying our proposal can be described as naturalistic and bottom-up. By “naturalistic” we mean that the approach has to be empirically grounded. In particular, it must not take idealistically for granted the existence of a self-conscious self as the ground of all mental life, as happens in certain philosophical and psychological accounts. By “bottom up” we mean that we start with what is simpler, more primitive, less structured, to reach what is complex, more structured, phylogenetically and ontogenetically later. However, as will be clarified later, we do not believe that it is possible to account for “higher” forms of self-consciousness without taking into account the influence of social interaction processes. In short, our claim is that self-consciousnessda phenomenon that has been traditionally seen as primary, simple, givendturns out to be a complex neurocognitive and psychosocial construction. It develops from automatic and pre-reflective

* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (M. Marraffa), [email protected] (A. Paternoster). 1 Web site: http://host.uniroma3.it/docenti/marraffa/index.htm. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.08.003 0732-118X/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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processing of representations of objects (object-consciousness), through awareness and then self-awareness of the body, up to introspective self-awareness and then narrative identity. In recent years, an empirically informed account of the precursors of self-consciousness has been much cultivated in theoretical psychology. Most approaches, however, still assume a minimal form of self-consciousness as the basis of cognitively more advanced forms; they construe this minimal self-consciousness as a “pre-reflective self-consciousness,” a tacit, non-intellectual sense of self that makes every conscious state a first-person phenomenal state (e.g., Gallagher & Zahavi, 2015; Prebble, Addis, & Tippett, 2013). We have argued elsewhere, however, that this is an empirically void construct, the artifact of a top-down approach to selfconsciousness in which the philosopher's self-experience is (antinaturalistically) taken as explanatory, instead of the phenomenon to be explained (Marraffa & Paternoster, in press). Against this regressive tendency, our approach is built around a clear-cut distinction between object-consciousness and self-consciousness. This allows bodily and psychological forms of self-consciousness to be seen as the result of a process of self-objectivation which requires conscious (but not self-conscious) representational activity. In this framework, the most minimal form of self-consciousness is bodily self-consciousness, the capacity to construct an analogical and imagistic representation of one's own body as an entire object,

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simultaneously taking this representation as a subject; i.e., as an active source of the representation of itself. Bodily selfconsciousness, it will be argued, is needed as a foundation for narrative identity. Thus we propose an account of narrative identity that parts company with those accounts that pay little attention to the role of the body in the narrative self-concept, or go to the extreme of stating that the narrative self is abstract and hence not embodied (see Atkins, 2008; Brandon, 2014; Mackenzie, 2008, 2009). On the other hand, our account rejects the hypothesis that the embodiment of the narrative self is provided by pre-reflective selfconsciousness, here understood as a primitive, proprioceptive form of self-consciousness already in place from birth (e.g., Gallagher & Meltzoff, 1996; Rochat, 2012). This hypothesis, which could be characterized as a sort of inflated version of the bottom-up approachdinflated to the point that any self-conscious function rests on bodily representationsd, is far from being empirically supported. Rather, it appears to be based on disputable a priori philosophical assumptions. Consciousness of the body as one's own body is necessary in order to construct self-consciousness as psychological self-awareness and then narrative identity. Psychological self-description hinges on physical self-description, evolving from it through an interplay of mentalizing capacities, autobiographical memory, and sociocommunicative skills modulated by cultural variables. Merely because the narrative self is neurocognitively and socially constructed, we are not prohibited from pursuing a robust view of it. In eliminative versions of narrativism, made popular mainly by Dennett (1991, 2005; see also Metzinger, 2003), the self simply does not exist: there is nothing but a confabulatory narrative elaborated by our brains to make sense of the chaotic flow of experience and make social relations more effective. We are proposing a naturalistic form of narrativism that radically dissents from any attempt to eliminate the self. Constructing and protecting an identity that is “valid” as far as possibledwe will argue on a psychodynamic basisdis a foundation of the intrapersonal and interpersonal balances of human organism, and thus, of psychological well-being and mental health. Our agenda is as follows. We begin with William James' distinction between I and Me, arguing that the “I-self” designates the very objectifying process that produces the Me-self; it denotes the subject's self-representing, where “subject” refers to a system encompassing mechanisms that interact across social, individual, and subpersonal levels. Within the framework we appropriated from James we try to tell a viable story as to how the “narrative self” is constructed after the onset of bodily self-awareness. Drawing on findings from developmental, dynamic, social and personality psychology, our account of narrative self-construction aims to distance itself from both the hermeneutical and eliminativist forms of narrativism. The article concludes with a psychodynamic conception of psychological self-awareness, which defines it as the self-representing of a multilevel system, and a description of identity that establishes a teleology focused on self-defense. 1. The I as the making of the Me For Prebble et al. (2013), a pre-reflective self-awareness is the key to understanding the Jamesian notion of the I, or subjective self (as opposed to the Me, or objective self). We will now argue, that this reading of James' notion rests on a serious misunderstanding of his theory of the duplex self. In his seminal chapter on the “consciousness of self” James (1950, vol. I, chap. 10) begins with noticing that both the common man and the spiritualist philosopher are spontaneously led to suppose that in phenomenological space there is an innermost center, the dynamic center of initiative and free will (“the active

element in all consciousness”) denoted by the pronoun “I” (p. 297). James calls it “pure Ego,” noting that philosophers' interpretations of it lie along a spectrum from claiming that it is “a simple active substance, the soul,” which is metaphysical guarantee of the presence of the self to the world, to the Humean view that “it is nothing but a fiction, the imaginary being denoted by the pronoun I” (p. 298). In this dispute James is all for Hume and against the spiritualists.2 And, like Hume, James vainly strives to get a glimpse of his ego in the stream of consciousness. Let us follow him as he argues for what Jervis (2011) calls “the theory of the evanescence of the ego.” If I say, “I kick the ball,” the pronoun “I” refers to myself as an agent organism, taken as a whole and opposed to an external object. The ball is a completely external object; but sometimes I (as a global agent subject) can also consider an object that is not totally outside, such as a foot (that is part of my being but nevertheless “down there”), or a hand, or even something else that is more “here” (or “less there”) than the foot is, for instance, my eyes or my head, which are almost part of the intimacy of the ego. In these cases I keep on detaching and differentiating my ego, as a primary psychic subject, from all these other things, which are objects for the ego. Up to this point, therefore, I am still rather certain of what my ego is. But then, like anyone, I realize that I am also able to consider as objects things that are much more “inner,” namely, the global image of my body, a sensation, a smell, a dream, a thought, a mood like anxiety or euphoria. I realize then that there is no way to stop this “hemorrhage” of my ego: in introspectively probing my mind, I keep on taking as an object anything it contains, thus detaching it from myself. But the ego, as wellspring of the whole process, can never be found. In the end, James says, the ego ends up being a pure grammatical trick, a sort of dimensionless pointeor, more unsettlingly, the “wavering and unstable phantom” evoked by Schopenhauer in a famous passage (1969, vol. 1, p. 278n.). The ego is therefore something evanescent; it (the agent and observing self) is an abstract and depthless subjectivity. Ultimately, this subjectivity is a convention; it cannot be located anywhere. The subject, taken to its limit, does not exist. However, after the pure ego has disappeared, James grounds the existential feeling of presence in the subject's experiencing itself as the empirical self (the Me-self). This is the way one presents oneself to oneself, thus objectifying oneself in the introspective consciousness of oneself. This self-presentation is a description of identity, which famously comes in three forms of reflexive experience: the material, social, and spiritual selves. We interpret James, then, as arguing that the I-self is a process of objectifying, which produces the Me-self. The I-self is not “a metaphysical entity that stands outside our stream of consciousness as the subject of our experiences.” It is not even an implicit, pre-reflective self-awareness, “understood as an integral feature of our conscious experience of the world,” as Prebble et al. (2013, p. 821) claim, following Legrand (2007) and Zahavi (2005). The I-self is rather a process, the self-representing of a system encompassing mechanisms that interact across social, individual or personal, and subpersonal levels of organization (see Herschbach, 2012; Synofzik, Vosgerau, & Newen, 2008; Thagard, 2014). One implication is that there cannot be a “subjective sense of self” (not even a “brute” first-personal experience) without a “content of self”: our “conscious, phenomenological experience of selfhood” is our feeling of being here as being here in a certain way, according to a mental representation “comprising all the things

2 “It is to the imperishable glory of Hume and Herbart and their successors to have taken so much of the meaning of personal identity out of the clouds and made of the self an empirical and verifiable thing” (1890, p. 336).

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that we perceive and know about ourselves” (Prebble et al., 2013, p. 817). This is well captured by Dan McAdams: the I-self, he makes clear, “is really more like a verb; it might be called ‘selfing’ or ‘I-ing,’ the fundamental process of making a self out of experience.” The Me-self is instead “the primary product of the selfing process; ” it is “the self that selfing makes” (1996, p. 302). It is “the making of the Me that constitutes what the I fundamentally is” (McAdams & Cox, 2010, p. 162).3 So construed, James' theory of the duplex self entails that there is no consciousness of self without knowledge of self: I know that I exist insofar as I know that I exist in a certain way, with particular features, as a describable identity. This is in full agreement with a naturalized conception of the conscious mind as a set of heterogeneous forms of active relationship (specifically, through the activity of constructing representations) between a living organism (the subject) and its worldenvironment (the object) (see Paternoster, 2014, chap. 17). In this perspective, self-consciousness is a variation of our relationship to the world. Consciousness takes as its object first the bodily image, and then the image of the mind, thus representing itself. This conception of self-consciousness as a mental operation (as a process of self-objectivation) contradicts the intuitive notion that it is primary, elemental, simple, preceding any other form of “knowing.” Far from being a basic modality of consciousness, a primary, simple “knowing of being here,” self-consciousness consists in “watching” oneself, “seeking after” oneself. It is always a knowing of being here in a certain waydand “this knowing of being here is never exhaustive, in the sense that it is a search for oneself always unsatisfactory, and hence interminable” (Jervis, 2011, p. 71). 2. A “third-person-first” approach to psychological selfawareness If being self-conscious consists in knowing that one exists as a describable identity, the development of self-consciousness consists of the construction of different forms of self-identity. In its simplest form, self-description is description of a physical identity. Infants under 1 year of age can rely upon precocious kinds of bodily representations. These afford an awareness of individual body parts, not a representation of the body as a whole (Brownell, Svetlova, & Nichols, 2012, p. 40). The awareness of the child's body as unitary source of her actions and of her gazedas measured by the mirror self-recognition testdgradually emerges between the 18 and 24 months (Courage, Edison, & Howe, 2004). At this point, when the child recognizes himself in a body distinguishable from others' bodies, when he comes to know himself as a bearer of physical, physiognomic, bodily features, he first gains access to the feeling of existing. But 18- to 24-month-olds can master the subjective-objective space of the body, not yet the virtual inner space of the mind, They are not yet able to objectify their own subjectivity, knowing that it is their own subjectivity, in the same way in which they are able to objectify their own bodies, knowing that they are their own bodies. We consequently agree with those researchers (e.g., Morin, 2003; Povinelli, 2001) who have challenged a strong mentalistic interpretation of mirror selfrecognition, according to which it already requires an introspective form of self-consciousness and a self-concept inherently linked to understanding the mental states of other people (e.g., Keenan, Gallup, & Falk, 2003, chap. 4). At an early stage, bodily self-consciousness is likely to be structured by nonverbal and analogic representation of one's own

3 Surprisingly, Prebble et al. (2013, p. 818) interpret McAdams's reading of James' theory of the duplex self as compatible with their model.

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body; but very soon it begins to be mediated by verbal exchange with the caregiver. Unlike what occurs in non-human animals, in our species purely bodily self-consciousness is almost immediately outstripped and encompassed by the descriptive selfconsciousness, linked to language. Here begins the process leading to self-consciousness as introspective recognition of the presence of the virtual inner space of the mind, separated from the other two primary experiential spaces: corporeal and extracorporeal. Part of the basis for studying the appearance of such introspective self-description in 3-to 4-year-old children was already provided by Piaget (1929) and Mead (1934). Placing their ideas in a contemporary context, the hypothesis would be that introspection takes shape through the act of turning on oneself the capacity to “read” other minds under the adult's socio-communicative pressure. In this perspective, the understanding of other minds ontogenetically precedes and grounds the understanding of our own minds. Carruthers (2011, 2015) has made a strong case for the claim that third-person mentalization (i.e., mindreading) has functional and evolutionary priority over first-person mentalization (i.e., introspection). His Interpretive Sensory-Access (ISA) model of selfknowledge is a sophisticated version of a “symmetrical or self/ other parity account of self-knowledge” (Schwitzgebel, 2014, x2.1). The model is well in line with the global workspace model of the human neurocognitive architecture (Baars, 1988, 1997; Dehaene, 2014; Shanahan, 2010), which posits a range of perceptual systems that broadcast their outputs to a collection of consumer systems that use concepts. Among these there are systems that use the perceptual input to form judgments or make decisions; and among the judgment-forming systems there is a mindreading system which, driven by a folk-psychological theoretical framework, produces higher-order, metarepresentational, beliefs about the mental states of others and of oneself. One's mindreading system, then, has access to all sensory information broadcast by one's perceptual systems; and hence it can have a non-interpretive (“recognitional”) access to one's own sensory and affective states. However, the system cannot directly attribute thoughts (e.g., beliefs, decisions, intentions) to itself. Such thoughts are not globally broadcast but are the output of conceptual consumer systems; and there aren't any causal pathways from the outputs of these systems to mindreading, as would be needed to allow introspective access to one's thoughts. Consequently, the mindreading system must exploit the globally broadcast perceptual information, together with some forms of stored knowledge, to infer the agent's thoughts, precisely as happens with the reading of other minds. Thus thoughts are always attributed to the self by means of a process of self-interpretation, which rests on the sensory awareness of data concerning one's own behavior, contextual data and/or sensory items in working memory (e.g., imagery or sentences in inner speech). It should be noted, however, that the ISA model holds that mindreading has a functional and evolutionary priority over introspection, but it does not predict that the former is developmentally prior to the latter (Carruthers, 2009, p. 167). By contrast, we make just such a claim. Let us see why. Carruthers thinks that the ISA model can incorporate Gazzaniga's (2000) and Wilson's (2002) hypothesis that “the mindreading system, when turned upon oneself, is doing more than just interpreting”; it also “plays additional roles in building a self-narrative and maintaining a positive self-image” (Carruthers, 2010, p. 83). Moreover, to explain why we have the false intuition that we can introspect our thoughts, Carruthers takes very seriously Wilson's hypothesis that the self-transparency assumption “may make it easier for subjects to engage in various kinds of adaptive self-

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deception, helping them build and maintain a positive self-image” (Carruthers, 2009, p. 138, n.5). Finally, in looking at the possibility that introspection is a by-product of the evolution of mindreading, Carruthers considers that possibility as compatible with the hypothesis that introspection “might have come under secondary selection thereafter, perhaps by virtue of helping to build and maintain a positive self-image, as Wilson [ … ] suggests” (Carruthers, 2009, p. 128). Here Carruthers is opening the door to the topic of defense mechanisms. After all, the ISA model draws heavily on data about confabulation from the huge literatures on cognitive dissonance and causal attribution (2011, chap.11), and neither cognitive dissonance nor causal attribution can be separated from constructing and maintaining “a positive self-image.” In social psychology self-image defense (closely linked to the self-defensive use of causal attribution) and the rationalizing characteristic of cognitive dissonancednot to mention stereotypes and prejudices, and social attitudes more generallydare regarded as building blocks of an interpersonal and social reality packed with structures of selfdeception. Such structures are defensive constructions that spring from mental operations in which the cognitive aspect cannot be sharply separated from the affective (see De Caro & Marraffa, 2015). There is a problem, though. Carruthers focuses on introspection construed as knowledge of one's own current mental states; and this knowledge “is arguably more fundamental than knowledge of oneself as a self with an ongoing mental life” (Carruthers, Fletcher, & Ritchie, 2012, p. 14; italics added). Now, insofar as Carruthers takes introspection merely as the ability to attribute one's own current mental states to oneself, his position prevents Gazzaniga and Wilson's hypothesis of the self-defensive nature of introspection from being built into the ISA theory. Defenses make sense only when psychological self-consciousness or subjective identity (“a self with an ongoing mental life”) is being constructed and protected. Once introspection is put in this context, however, the hypothesis can be put forward that it develops through the act of turning on oneself the competence to read others' minds; and that this occurs through the socio-communicative interaction with caregivers (and successively other social partners) that is investigated in attachment research. Attachment theory works within a contextualist and systemic framework, where (individual) biology and (social) relationality cannot be separated. Individuals are pre-wired for interpersonal relationships from the birth, and mindreading is part and parcel of such pre-organization. It makes perfect sense, therefore, that the early-developing core mindreading system is an innate socialcognitive adaptation independent of the attachment system (e.g., Gergely & Unoka, 2008). This leads us to reject the hypothesis that in human beings there is an inherent causal and functional link between the quality of early infant attachment on the one hand, and the development of mindreading on the other. At most, attachment can scaffold the development of mindreading.4 For introspection, in contrast, the relationship between attachment and mentalizing is no longer just one of scaffolding: the child's socio-communicative interaction with caregivers is constitutively involved in the construction of the inner experiential space (an introspective form of self-consciousness that then evolves as narrative identity). Carruthers' theory of introspection needs to be integrated with a socio-constructivist account of the developmental mechanisms by which social-cognitive abilities give rise to psychological self-consciousness (see Fernyhough, 2009; Hernik,

4 This scaffolding begins as proto-conversational interchange, and only later becomes linguistic, consisting in mothers' internal-state talk that is appropriately attuned to the infant's thoughts and feelings (Meins, 2011).

Fearon, & Fonagy, 2009). Introspection is not merely attributing one's own current mental states to oneself; it is a higher-order mental activity that originates from the interplay of the mindreading system and the autobiographical memory system under the communicative pressure of micro-social contexts; specifically, in relationships with significant others. In brief, introspective self-consciousness takes shape in the child in a social-communicative relationship with the caregiver. Through such interaction with caregivers (and then with other social partners) children construct their own identity, both objective (for others) and subjective (for themselves). And the identity-foroneself can be said to arise out of the identity-for-others; introspective self-description takes shape through a creative process of internalizing the ways in which others see and define us.5 3. Constructing a temporally extended self Subjective identity evolves. The child gradually comes to experience himself as a person, to define himself as a certain kind of person, and to trace his own continuous identity as a person across time and space. As James puts it, subjective identity consists in finding oneself again among the intermittences of consciousness: “Each of us when he awakens says, Here's the same old self again, just as he says, Here's the same old bed, the same old room, the same old world” (1950, vol. I, p. 334). This is a complex cognitive achievement, the establishment of an autobiographical memory system. Children are required to achieve the capacity to perceive their identity as situated in memory: they must be able to represent not only the “what,” “where,” and “when” of a past event, but also themselves as the subjects who experienced that event. This perception of an identity situated in memory will be progressively structured in terms of autobiography. For Prebble et al. (2013), the unity of an autobiographical narrative rests upon a supposed primary phenomenological continuity. This claim rests on an explanation of episodic autobiographical memory in terms of pre-reflective self-consciousness. It is pre-reflective self-consciousness (“the phenomenological flavor of mineness through time,” as they say cryptically on p. 829) that is the precondition for episodic autobiographical memory, which in turn, because of its qualities of autonoetic consciousness and mental time travel, is a prerequisite for experiencing unity in our subjective experience of selfhood across timeda phenomenological kind of self-continuity (Addis & Tippett, 2008, p. 73). Our ability to remember episodically solves the problem of diachronic unity insofar as it carries “the inherent ‘mineness’ of the original experience into the present moment” (Prebble et al., 2013, pp. 818e819). The next developmental step will be gaining a sense of narrative self-continuity, which depends mainly on semantic autobiographical memory. However, appealing to pre-reflective self-consciousness to define episodic autobiographical memory is hardly plausible. In the first place, it can be argued that the most important factor to the emergence of autobiographical memory is self-consciousness as measured in the mirror self-recognition task. The nonverbal, analogic representation of the bodily self constructed in the second year of life acts as a fixed referent around which personally

5 Mead's (1934) famous hypothesis is still fundamental to understand the relationship between individual differentiation and social belonging. However, it also has the drawback of underestimating the complexity, the fatigue, the creative aspects and risks of the internalization process. Developmental, social and dynamic psychology amended Mead's hypothesis, making it clear that infants are active creators not only of their structures of relationship with other people, but also of their ways of self-presentation.

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experienced event memories begin to be organized. This hypothesis builds on Mark Howe and Mary Courage's work (Howe, 2014; Howe, Courage, & Rooksby, 2009). But we take issue with the authors' construal of the fixed referent as a “cognitive self-concept,” because it seems to assume a mentalistic interpretation of mirror selfrecognition (see above, Section 2). In the second place, Prebble et al. (2013, p. 819) think that their framework can include both their interpretation of Tulving's account of episodic memory in terms of pre-reflective self-consciousness and Conway's (2005) model of the interconnectedness of self and memory. But this cannot be the case. For Conway, autobiographical memories are generated within a complex mental system called the “self-memory-system,” which consists of the interaction between the working self and the autobiographical memory knowledge base. The autobiographical knowledge base is organized into hierarchical knowledge structures that range from highly abstract conceptual knowledge (such as that contained in the conceptual self) to conceptual knowledge that is event-specific and closer to experience. Such knowledge structures terminate in episodic memories, which are (mostly imagistic) representations providing summary records of perceptual-conceptual-affective processing derived from working memory. Now, these episodic memories are durably retained only if they have become linked to conceptual autobiographical knowledge; otherwise, they are rapidly forgotten. In the self-memory-system, therefore, autobiographical memory is a knowledge base a person possesses about herself, of which episodic memory is “only one possible aspect or instance” (Hoerl, 2007, p. 637, n.4). It is the conceptual organization of episodic memories within the selfmemory system that transforms them into autobiographical memory and allows them to play a role in constructing and maintaining a coherent, stable mental representation of self over time. But then, if episodic memory is taken as a prerequisite for experiencing diachronic unity, phenomenological self-continuity cannot be “theoretically and empirically separable” from narrative self-continuity, as Prebble et al. claim (2013, p. 818). 4. Dissociation of the Jamesian Selves We have argued that psychological self-description hinges on bodily self-description, evolving from it through an interplay of mentalization, autobiographical memory, and language. It is important to notice, however, that the transition from a bodily and social identity to an introspective identity is not an all-or-nothing matter. Povinelli (2001) and his colleagues investigated the development of a temporally extended sense of self with a delayed video version of the mirror mark task. The test involves filming experimenter and child playing a distractor game, during which a large sticker is covertly placed on top of the child's head. After a delay of three minutes, children watch the video recording of the previous events and their reaction is assessed. Reaching up to touch or remove the sticker is taken as evidence for a temporally extended self-concept because it involves understanding the causaletemporal relation between the past self (represented on the screen) and the current self (currently watching the recording). Only around 4e5 years of age did children consistently reach for the sticker. It can be doubted, however, whether the delayed selfrecognition measure indicates a psychological self that is continuous through time. For, if the task is a valid measure of selfawareness as psychological self, patients with autistic spectrum disorders should perform badly on it. But children on the autistic spectrum can recognize themselves in the delayed image just as well as typically developing 4- to 5- year olds (Lind & Bowler,

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2009). This finding suggests that recognizing themselves in the delayed video really does indicate a self continuous through time, but the self in question is the physical self and not the psychological one. Those on the autistic spectrum, then, appear to possess a coherent representation of their own bodies across time; however, being impaired in mindreading abilities, they cannot make that transition from the physical to the introspective self-description which occurs by virtue of the interplay of mindreading, autobiographical memory and socio-communicative skills.6 The hypothesis of a dissociation between bodily and psychological aspects of self-consciousness is congruent with some data from cultural psychology and ethnopsychiatry, which show that in adults belonging to preliterate cultures a self-consciousness predominates that is for the most part physical and social rather than psychological. These subjects show insufficient capacity to represent a virtual inner space of the mind; hence, as it can be observed in 3 year-old children (Meyer & Shore, 2001; Piaget, 1929), they do not think of dreams as the product of their own minds, but rather as visions originating from outside. Emotions and passions, being experienced as objective and not subjective events, are ascribed to chance accidents of the body, or are perceived as being “possessed” by some force or entity that comes from the outside; thinking is confused with speaking (here “I think” essentially means “I say” or “I tell me”); even projects and fantasies are only partially objectified, hence examined with difficulty. Moreover, all these events are unrelated to one another, insofar as they are not causally integrated within a unitary phenomenological space. This psychological and cultural condition fosters somaticpragmatic rather than psychological conceptions of the individual, with the consequence that the agents conceive of themselves essentially in terms of physical identity. And physical identity gives shape to social identity: the agent considers himself responsible insofar as he is socially held responsible for his actions, whether they be past, present or future. By contrast, he is never able to own the products of his mind responsibly and self-critically, given his difficulty building an inner experiential space. In James' idiom, these subjects possess a material self and a social self but lack a spiritual self (or possess one only partially).7

5. The full-fledged psychological self-awareness: the narrative self Thus, psychological self-awareness evolves in an interplay of mentalization, autobiographical memory, and language modulated by cultural variables. The child who at 3e4 years of age turned her third-person mindreading capacities upon herself under the influence of mind-related talk from caregivers, between 4 and 5 begins to grasp her subjective identity in terms of autobiography (Fivush, 2011). This is “narrative identity,” an internalized and evolving story of the self that can provide the jumble of autobiographical memories “with some semblance of unity, purpose, and meaning” (McAdams & Olson, 2010, p. 527; see also McLean & Syed, 2015). Although a life narrative begins to emerge in middle childhood, the complexity and coherence of this narrative increase across adolescence. For the ability to construct a life story evolves with the development of a set of social-cognitive competencies that permit “autobiographical reasoning,” a self-reflective process through

6 See Williams (2010, p. 486), for whom these findings suggest that awareness of the physical self and awareness of the psychological self each depend on its own dedicated representational system, only one of which is impaired in autism. 7 The early evidence concerning preliterate subjects' difficulties in representing an inner experiential space was collected by Luria (1976).

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which one creates relations between different parts of one's past, present, and future life and one's personality and development (Habermas, 2011). The social-cognitive competencies underlying autobiographical reasoning include the ability to put past events in temporal order (temporal coherence), the ability to account for changes or developments in the self over time (causal coherence), and the ability to summarize and interpret themes within stories and apply these to one's own life (thematic coherence). Habermas and de Silveira's (2008) study showed an increase in all three coherence measures during adolescence. Autobiographical reasoning is constitutive of narrative identity. It embeds personal memories in a culturally, temporally, causally, and thematically coherent life story; thus, in keeping with our argument in the third section, the life story format establishes and re-establishes the diachronic continuity of the self (Habermas & €ber, 2015). When say that full-fledged psychological selfKo awareness is constructed by means of a socio-linguistically mediated life-narrative through which we achieve diachronic unity, we are making an empirical claim about the development of the self. Can this empirical claim be elevated to a metaphysical thesis about personal identity? A narrative account of personal identity answers affirmatively: we constitute ourselves as persons by forming and using autobiographical narrativesdthe unity of a person is the unity of an autobiographical narrative. In connection with that, some caveats are in order. Some proponents of a narrative approach to the self object that there is more to our personal identity than mere psychological continuity: there is also an active process of self-interpretation. Yet what, in this context, is “self-interpretation”? Authors such as Alisdair Macintyre, Charles Taylor, and Paul Ricœur view the self as a self-interpreting being in a sense inspired by the hermeneutical tradition (Schechtman, 2011). However, we should be cautious about ideas from a philosophical tradition that is foreign to our naturalistic commitments. In Carruthers' ISA model, selfinterpretation is a theory-driven narrative re-appropriation of the products of the neurocognitive unconscious. By contrast, a hermeneutical notion of self-interpretation, emphasizing meaning at the expense of the psychobiological theme of the unconscious, risks surreptitiously reintroducing the idealistic conception of the conscious subject as primary subject. For the subjectivity suggested by the hermeneuticists is inevitably intentionalizing, rather than intentionalized by the unconscious (Di Francesco & Marraffa, 2014). We also distance ourselves from the eliminative versions of narrativism, such as Dennett's “Joycean machine” theory. For Dennett, narrativism and eliminativism about the self are two sides of the same coin. The “I” is the useful fiction of a central controller; its autobiography is a confabulatory byproduct of the decentralized activity in the brain that is actually responsible for behavior. We dissent from the eliminativist argument that infers from the nonprimary, derivative nature of the self its status as an epiphenomenal byproduct of neurobiological eventsdor alternatively, of socio-linguistic practices. Our main reason for dissenting is that the outcome of the Joycean machine, the product of the machinery in the head that composes the autobiography and controls verbal reports in the first person, is responsible for stable, integrated and enduring aspects of human behavior (Di Francesco, Marraffa, & Paternoster, 2014). First, in McAdams and Olson's (2010) systematic review of personality psychology, we find that the perceiving one's own identity in terms of narrative identity grows up from at least two cognitive layers: (i) traits of personality, largely determined by genetic factors and substantially stable through the life cycle; (ii) goals, plans, projects, values and other constructs that define the life of an individual. Thus, the internalized and evolving story of the self generated by the Joycean Machine is by no means contingent

and evanescent; it is firmly anchored in the person's dispositional traits and characteristic goals and motives. Second, the eliminativists disregard the essential psychodynamic component of narrative self-construction. Breaking with a long philosophical tradition that has viewed self-consciousness as a purely cognitive phenomenon,8 attachment theory and infant research have shown that the construction of affectional bonds and the construction of identity cannot be separated. The description of the self that the child feverishly pursues from 2 to 3 years of age is an “accepting description,” a description that is indissolubly cognitive (as a definition of self) and emotionalaffectional (as an acceptance of self). Briefly, the child needs a clear and consistent capacity to describe himself or herself, in a manner that is fully legitimized by the caregiver and socially valid. In fact, this will continue to be the case during the entire lifespan: constructing an affectional life will always be intimately connected to constructing a well-defined and interpersonally valid identity. One will devote not a small part of one's resources to creating situations that guarantee not only material protection but also a positive self-image, and together with it the appropriate supply of self-esteem. In so doing, everyone seeks a confirmation of the solidity of the self. This is a crucial point: one cannot ascribe concreteness and solidity to one's own self-consciousness if the latter does not possess at its center a description of identity that must be clear and must also be “good,” in the sense of being worthy of being loved. Our mental balance rests on this feeling of solidly existing as an “I.” If the self-description becomes uncertain, the subject soon loses the feeling of existing. Our claim can be illustrated clinically as well as developmentally. The model of identity development still most widely referenced is Erikson's (1968). For Erikson, identity formation represents the main task of the developmental stage of adolescence. The fundamental problem of adolescence is how to move beyond the heteronomy of identity. In place of a heteronomous definition (linked to the relationship with one's parents), the quest for an autonomous self-definition makes headway: an identity freed from any protective recognition, mediated by identifications with transitional figures, and hinged on non-familial life. Psychotic decompensation, so dramatic and common a risk between 16 and 18 years of age, can be interpreted to a significant extent as a failure in achieving the autonomy of identity. In the transition from emerging adulthood to young adulthood, identity issues have an almost equally prominent role. Individuals who approach their late twenties carrying the burden of mental disorders, disturbed behavior, and unresolved social drifts, often begin to suffer acutely from having failed to build an identity that is adult, self-determined, socially recognizable and acceptable; and in this very painful crisis, the pre-existing psychological problems can easily get worse. A typical task of the psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic work is the maturational clearing up of infantile remains within personality; i.e., remnants of lack of psychological autonomy in subjects in their late twenties, often in their early thirties (Jervis, 1997, pp. 73e74). The close interrelationship between the construction of psychological well-being and identity consolidation reveals itself still more clearly in the developmental psychopathology of attachment. According to attachment theory, maladaptive patterns in the infanteparent relationship lead to a chronic feeling of insecurity, or lack of self-esteem, lack of confidence in oneself, lack of solidity of the ego, lack of cohesion of the self (expressions that we take to be

8 For instance, “Self-consciousness is primarily a cognitive, rather than an affective state” (Bermúdez, 2007, p. 456).

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essentially synonymous).9 Personality disorders offer a paradigmatic illustration of such an insufficient sense of identity. So, for example, in patients suffering from narcissistic personality disorder the feeling of identity is so precarious (the self has so little cohesion) that they find it difficult to feel that they truly exist, and are afraid of completely losing contact with themselves if deprived of the link with situations, things or persons which serve as symbols that help to reassure them about their identity (e.g., Kohut, 1977). Identity diffusiondproblems with identity that become pathological by creating a “markedly and persistent unstable self-image or sense of self” (APA, 2013, p. 664)dis one of the defining characteristics of borderline personality disorder (Kernberg, 1984). Interestingly, Crawford et al (2004) suggest that young individuals who experience identity diffusion might use cluster B symptoms (borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic symptoms) as a form of maladaptive defense against the distress, which typically arises from a poorly consolidated identity. Intimacy and engagement imply a constant threat of fusion and consequent loss of a fragile identity, both of which can be defended against by the symptoms and disturbed behavior seen in borderline patients. We are now in a position to sketch the idea of human subject underlying the psychodynamic inquiry into defenses. The narrative self that we have investigated thus far is a construction without metaphysical guarantee; it is not something guaranteed once and for all, but a precarious acquisition, continuously under construction by a human organism and constantly exposed to the risk of dissolution (Marraffa, 2013, p. 109). This precariousness is the key to grasping the defensive nature of narrative self-construction. The need to construct and protect an identity that is valid to the greatest extent possible is rooted in the organism's primary need to subjectively subsist, and to solidly exist as an “I.” Far from being an epiphenomenal, transient phenomenon, a fictional character invented to facilitate predictions of behavior without any real correlate (a temporary virtual captain), the incessant construction and reconstruction of an acceptable and adaptively functioning identity is the process that produces our intra- and inter-personal balances, hence serves as a foundation of psychological wellbeing and mental health. Unlike Dennett's Joycean monologue, in our model self-narrative is not empty chatter: it is a causal center of gravity. 6. Drawing the strands together In this article we drew on developmental, dynamic, social and personality psychology to put forward a view of the onset of selfconsciousness as the establishment of a process of selfdescription (the “selfing” process). Selfing is the self-representing of a system encompassing mechanisms that interact across social, individual, and subpersonal levels. Self-consciousnessda phenomenon traditionally seen as primary, simple, givendturns out to be a complex neurocognitive and psychosocial construction, which develops from automatic, pre-reflective processing of representations of objects (object-consciousness), through the awareness and then self-awareness of the body, up to introspective self-awareness and then narrative identity. Essentially this approach to narrative self-construction has two implications. First, it enables us to reject idealistic, and more generally aprioristic, accounts of the self. Here is how we have interpreted the claim that a minimal self is a precondition of an autobiographical self: the most minimal form of self-consciousness is bodily self-

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“Basic fault” in Balint (1992); “primary ontological insecurity” in Laing (1960).

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Massimo Marraffa is associate professor of Philosophy of Science at University Roma Tre (Rome, Italy), and member of the PhD School Board in Cognitive Neurosciences and Philosophy of Mind, The Institute for Advanced Study IUSS Pavia. His research focuses primarily on issues in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology, on which he has published books, articles and book chapters in Italian and English.

Alfredo Paternoster is associate professor of Philosophy of Language at the University of Bergamo (Italy), and member of the PhD School Board in Philosophy, University of Turin. His main research interests concern topics in analytical philosophy of language and mind: theories of concepts, theories of perception, consciousness, cognitive semantics, mental simulation, epistemological foundations of cognitive science. He has published (as author or coauthor) five books and more than sixty papers or book chapters on these topics.