The “remembered” self

Abstract

The expression the remembered self is, I suspect, a cunningly designed oxymoron – rather like, say, the title of a recent book, The Remembered Present (Edelman, 1990), which also poses a conceptual challenge. I gladly accept the challenge, for I shall want to argue in what follows that Self is not an entity that one can simply remember, but is, rather, a complex mental edifice that one constructs by the use of a variety of mental processes, one of which must surely be remembering. I shall want to concentrate in what follows on the nature and course of these construction processes and upon some of the conditions that guide and constrain them.