In order to properly appreciate the implications of the notion of narrative self-enactment, it is necessary to briefly delineate some points of contention in the literature. The recent philosophical debate on narrative selfhood has been focused on whether narratives can provide a sufficient characterization of the self. Studies on the narrative self move from the assumption that our personal identity is composed of narratives structurally and thematically analogous to those we tell each other or read in books (McLean et al. 2007). While the notion of narrative may appear intuitive, individuating a limited set of necessary and sufficient conditions to define it has proved to be a challenge. Some philosophers have proposed to define narratives as the description of a sequence of events and their causal or reason-based connections (Lamarque 2004; Hutto 2008). Other features of narratives, such as the meaningfulness and purposefulness of events narrated and their connections (Rudd 2007), as well as the social and distributed nature of narratives (Fabry 2021, Heersmink 2020), have also been highlighted.

Narrative accounts of the self are built around certain assumptions. One is the opposition to a Cartesian and substantialist understanding of the self: the narrative self is not a thing nor a substance, and it is not a given. Another one is the opposition to Neo-Lockean approaches based on the continuity of psychological relations over time, which, even though they are critical of the Cartesian view, present various shortcoming (see Schechtman 1996, 2014 for a discussion). Rather, the narrative self results from the continuous activity of making sense of one’s past and planning one’s future from a socially and historically embedded perspective, while negotiating the products of this process with others. Indeed, a widely recognized feature of the narrative self is its permeability to social interactions: parents and caregivers, teachers and peers, during development, concur to determine both the initial narrative self of the child and the narrative self of the person throughout life. As Taylor puts it: “the community is also constitutive of the individual, in the sense that the self-interpretations which define him are drawn from the interchange which the community carries on. A human being alone is an impossibility, not just de facto, but as it were de jure” (1985, p. 8). Thus, the stories we tell to make sense of our experience are not completely of our own makings. As noted by McConnell, the “vulnerability to co-authoring is essential to developing a self-narrative” (2016, p. 29).

The narrative self is typically the result of the integration of our own and others’ judgments about our identity. A widely shared assumption is that a certain degree of coherence in the narratives that define a person is achieved only late in the development (for a contrarian view, see Hyvärinen et al. 2010). As shown by Habermas and Paha (2001), while minimal forms of storytelling are developed almost simultaneously to language acquisition, it is only during adolescence that autobiographical narratives achieve some degree of coherence and consistency. This is not to say that the narrative self is thus achieved once and for all, nor that it acts as a single unifying framework through which we interpret our whole life and navigate every and each of our experiences. Although transforming and integrating the disorganized experience into a narrative is the main function of narrative self-understanding (Mackenzie and Poltera 2010), unresolved tensions, incongruity and fragmentation are never completely eliminated.

Following psychologists of personal identity, the narrative self can be analysed into two interrelated constructs: the self-concept, and the life story, (McLean et al. 2007). The self-concept is defined as the “conscious beliefs about the self that are descriptive or evaluative” (p. 263), it refers to the way a person conceives of themselves as having certain personality traits, certain psychological characteristics, and behavioural dispositions. The life story, also referred to as self or personal narrative, on the other hand, refers to the organized summary of (part of) one’s life. Major events and important changes typically figure in the life story and such story also has a degree of thematic continuity and coherence. The self-concept and the life story are tightly related: on one hand, the self-concept is explained in terms of life events (e.g., “I am a failure, because I have ruined every chance I have been given in life”), on the other hand, life events can also be accounted for in terms of self-concept (e.g., “Being a hardworking person made me reach all my objectives”).

Some scholars have opposed the view that narratives are all there is to selfhood: some have argued for a more basic and fundamental dimension (Gallagher 2000; Zahavi 2007; Thornton 2003; Newen 2018), referred to as embodied or experiential (or minimal, core) self. According to Newen, for example, the narrative self is the “explicit conceptualization and description of oneself” (2018, p.5), whereas the embodied self refers to a biological entity with the capacity for self-representation. In other words, the embodied self is the concrete agent whose actions are narrated, while the narrative self is the character to which these actions are ascribed to, the “who” of autobiographical narratives (Atkins 2004), which is progressively elaborated in the act of narrating.

These two aspects: embodiment and narrativity, are not the only ones that have been suggested in relation to the self, Gallagher (2013) for example presents an incomplete list including eight dimensions of the self. Nonetheless, focusing on these two components of selfhood, the problem of describing their relation arises. This problem has sparked a debate in which we may identify three positions.

1)

The Embodied And Narrative Selves do not Interact With Each Other

2)

The Embodied self Unidirectionally Influences The Narrative self, Or

3)

The Embodied self And Narrative Selves are Inextricably Interwoven

Proponents of 1), such as Dennett, argue that the narrative self is an “abstract object, a theorist’s fiction” (1992, p. 105), a concept possibly useful in elaborating folk psychological explanations, but nowhere to be found in a naturalistic ontology. As noted by Brandon (2016), this thesis may appear paradoxical: if the narrative self is a fictional creation, who is the creator? Dennett’s strategy to solve the paradox consists in claiming that the narrative self emerges from the bottom-up brain’s capacity of elaborating a self-image. A robot, aptly configured, could also display the capacity for narrative self-understanding (Dennett 1992).

Bickle (2003) proposes a similar view. On the basis of a method for the localization of functional units in the brain, called double dissociation, Bickle argues that there is a mutual functional independence between brain areas involved in narrative thinking and in motor planning such that “the neurally realized narrative self, neither accurately reflects nor causally affects very much of what is going on” (Bickle 2003, p. 202). Thus, the embodied self does not interact with its narrative counterpart and vice versa. Delusions and confabulations are cited by Bickle as prime examples of narrative and corporeal dimensions parting ways. While differing in the details, proponents of this stance come to agree that the narrative self is an abstraction and, in turn, that the corporeal and experiential dimension has a secondary, non-constitutive connection to the (narrative) self.

This has been met with opposition from proponents of 2, amongst whom we may consider Menary’s (2008) account. Menary claims that the two dimensions of selfhood are not fully insulated from each other; rather, embodiment is constitutive of the narrative self. In fact, personal narratives are not invented out of nothing but are shaped by lived experiences. The self engaged in storytelling is not abstract or fictional, it is rather an embodied, feeling and experiencing agent with their own personal history, psychological traits and cultural background.

As noted by Mackenzie (2014, p. 160), there is an ambiguity in Menary’s account. If the narrative self is embodied, the distinction between the embodied and narrative dimensions of selfhood seems to collapse and the two become coincidental. But this is not conceded by Menary (2008), who seems to maintain the dualism between a narrative self and a pre-narrative embodied subject whose experience provides the “pre-narrative fodder” with which the narrative self is assembled (p. 73).

In fact, authors supporting view 2 do not concede that the narrative self influences the embodied aspects of the self. The claim is that our practical and skilled engagement with the environment needs rarely, if ever, to be narratively structured. Navigating the environment does not require much thought – nor much narrative thought – in normal circumstances. For example, while driving, “I enact the skills without thinking about them, the fluid and flexible sequence of perceptions, actions and manipulations of steering wheel, gear stick, pedals, etc. is open ended and not easily captured as a narrative sequence” (Menary 2008, p. 70).

Zahavi (2007) notes that accounts of selfhood limited to the narrative dimension miss a fundamental aspect of being a self, that is, the experiential or embodied self, the first-person access to experience, “a pre-reflective and non-conceptual sense of ownership or consciously experienced “mineness” that accompanies bodily sensations, emotional states and cognitive contents” (p. 4). Thus, these accounts cannot be considered complete. He argues that this dimension of selfhood precedes the narrative self. Infants, for example, are universally endowed with a sense of selfhood (i.e., show signs of self-other differentiation) before they exhibit any form of narrative self-understanding, thus proving that there is a dimension of selfhood which precedes the narrative self. It is on the basis of this twofold aspect of selfhood, embodied or experiential and narrative, that we may say, along with psychologists of personal identity, that we are (embodied or experiential) selves creating stories, which in turn create (narrative) selves (McLean et al. 2007).

In this view, language, and narratives with it, comes to the fore only when we take a step back and “[…] remind ourselves of what we should be doing, or how we could do things differently” (Menary 2008, p. 70). Narratives only appear when one reflectively tries to understand and summarize one’s own experiences, but they are also involved – according to Menary – in planning and envisioning future directions. In contradiction with this latter assertion, he maintains that narratives have no impact on experience. Supporters of views 1 and 2 thus come to agree on this point: narratives are post hoc entities, whose role is that of justifying rather than guiding, explaining rather than affecting actions. Yet that is the point of contention for supporters of view 3.

Albeit with variations and disagreements, theorizers of the mutual influence and interaction of the two dimensions of selfhood agree that personal narratives affect experience and contribute to guide behaviour. One key tenet is that the distinction between the two dimensions of the self is an abstraction, while the two are “inextricably interwoven in practice” (Mackenzie 2014, p. 161), are entangled (Brandon 2016) and are in a “dynamic and recursive interplay” (Dings 2019).

The conceptual core of these positions is that narratives can eventually direct our interactions with the environment and bodily attitudes. As Brandon, criticizing view 2, notes: “For, currently, the relationship remains unidirectional, that is, the narrative self is presented as the ‘result’ or the ‘output’ of the body and experiences. Yet the narrative self feeds back into our body, the upshot of which is that the relationship between the narrative self and body is interactive” (2016, p. 68). She illustrates her point by means of an example. She turns to the psychotherapeutic method of schema therapy to concretely show the entanglement of behaviour and experience on the one hand, and narratives and schemas on the other. The goal of this therapeutic practice is that of making the distorting schemas that influence self-understanding explicit in order to change them. Once this step is implemented, “through this new framework, bodily and affective change can hopefully follow” (p. 80).

Additionally, while it is undisputed that the narrative self is subsequent to the embodied experience both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, some evidence suggests that the former is far from being a mere tinsel to the embodied self. For instance, there is a rich literature on how disruption either in the content or the structure of personal narratives are linked to pathologies such as depression and schizophrenia, respectively (Gallagher 2007; Lysaker and Lysaker 2001). Dysnarrativia, the incapacity of elaborating narratives, is a central symptom in some conditions, e.g., Alzheimer’s disease or dementia (Zimmermann 2017), in which we observe a waning sense of self. Moreover, it has been suggested that the textual analysis of autobiographical reports may be a useful tool for assessing certain mental conditions (Gallagher and Cole 2011). Taken together, these findings give preliminary grounding to the hypothesis that the narrative self can affect embodied aspects of the self. This argument and support for it are present in more depth in the following sections on the role of inner speech in narrative self-enactment, but before going into them, let’s consider the difference between narrative self-understanding and narrative self-enactment in inner speech.