Self-narratives: True and false
ULRIC NEISSER 2017-11-20
Self-narratives: True and false 自我叙述：真与假
ULRIC NEISSER 奈塞尔
Human beings exist through time, just as everything else does: One thing happens after another. But unlike anything else, people remember what happened to them - some of it, anyway. This is a remarkable achievement. The remarkable thing is not just that past events influence the present (which happens in all biological systems) but that they are explicitly reconstructed by the person who experienced them. By definition, such reconstructions are examples of episodic memory. If the remembered event seems to have played a significant part in the life of the rememberer, it becomes an example of autobiographical memory and may form part of a life narrative. Life narratives are significant because they are one way of defining the self.
就像一件接着一件发生的世间万物一样，人凭借时间而存在。但与其他事情不同的是，人们记得发生在他们身上的事情，不论那是什么事情。这是一项了不起的成就。值得注意的是，不仅是过去的事件影响了现在（发生在所有的生物系统中），而且经历过此事的人们明确地重建了它们。根据定义，这种重建是情景记忆的例子。如果记住的事件在回忆者的生活中似乎扮演着重要的角色，那么，它成为了一个典型的自传体记忆，并且可以形成生活叙事（life narrative）的一部分。生活叙事之所以重要，是因为它们是定义自我的一种方式。
This book has two goals: to explore the relations between remember-ing and the self, and to see those relations in proper perspective. Life narratives are often described as if they were the chief or even the only ingredient of the self: "They [life narratives] are the basis of personal identity and self-understanding and they provide answers to the question 'Who am I?'" (Polkinghorne, 1991, p. 136). This claim goes too far: Self-knowledge depends on perception, conceptualization, and private experience as well as narrative (Neisser, 1988). Self-narratives are a basis but not the basis of identity. It is appropriate, then, that the present volume is only one of a series devoted to self-knowledge and the self. An earlier book (Neisser, 1993a) was concerned with ecological and interpersonal perception; the self-concept will be considered in a subsequent volume.
这本书《记忆自我在自我叙事中的建构与准确性》（The remembering self Construction and accuracy in the self-narrative）有两个目的：探究记忆与自我的关系，以及从正确的角度去看待这些关系。生活叙事常常被描述为他们仿佛是自我的主要的、甚至唯一的组成部分：“他们[生活叙事]是个人认同和自我理解的基础，同时，他们提供了“我是谁？”这个问题的答案（Polkinghorne,1991,p. 136）。这种说法有些过头：自我知识依赖于感知，概念化，个人体验以及叙事（Neisser,1988）。自我叙述是身份的一个基础，而不是唯一的基础。因此，目前的这本书只是一系列致力于自知之明与自我的一本丛书，这么说是恰当的。这套丛书的上一本（Neisser,1993）关注的是生态与人际知觉；在下一本书的主题，将会考虑自我概念。
However important those other sources of self-knowledge may be, they are not our focus here. This book is concerned with the remembering self: with self-narratives and whether to believe them, with the functions of those narratives and what happens without them, with the social and individual determinants of what is recalled and what is forgotten, with skills of remembering and how those skills are acquired. In the chapters ahead these issues are addressed by a talented and diverse group of contributors; first it is appropriate to present some views of my own.
不管那些自知之明的来源有多么重要，它们都不是我们关注的焦点。这本书关注的是记忆自我：自我叙述，以及是否相信这些叙事。这些叙述的功能，以及没有它们会发生什么。那些遗忘和回想的社会和个人的决定因素，记忆的技巧，以及这些技能是如何获得的。在前面的章节中，这些问题由一才华多样的贡献者们解决；首先，提出一些我自己的观点是恰当的。