Not all self-narratives are true. Even when people strive for accuracy, what they remember may not be just what happened. In episodic memory we must distinguish: (1) the actual event; (2) the event as it was experienced by the individual in question; (3) the subsequent act of remembering it; and (4) the remembered event, that is, the particular version of (1) that is established by (3). The analogous categories in autobiographical memory are: (1) actual past events and the historical self who participated in them; (2) those events as they were then experienced, including the individual's own perceived self at the time; (3) the remembering self that is, the individual in the act of recalling those events on some later occasion; and (4) the remembered self Constructed on that occasion. Moreover, self-narratives do not rely on episodic memory alone. People often begin narratives with their own birth, although they do not remember it; some-times they even start with the deeds of their ancestors. Later events may also be reported without being actually remembered, if the narrator is sufficiently sure of them.
自我敘事不全是真實的,即使人们努力追求精确，但是他们所记得的可能并不只是所发生的。在情景记忆中，我们必须区分：（1）实际事件；（2）论及的个体所体验的事件；（3）随后的记忆行为；（4）记忆的事件，即，建立在(3)之上的(1)的特定版本。自传体记忆中类似的分类是：
These distinctions seem rather obvious to me, but in fact they are controversial. Not everyone agrees that it is useful to speak of real historical events, or of a "historical self." The British psychologists Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter, for example, note that "the epistemological status of 'original events' is problematic" (1992, p. 204). They see little point in postulating such events, which can never be definitely established any-way. The ordinary course of life rarely generates objective records. Even when a record happens to exist (e.g., a tape recording; cf. Neisser, 1981), it is often susceptible to more than one interpretation. According to Ed-wards and Potter, reality is not so much something against which memo-ries can be checked as something established by those memories them-selves. "Everyday conversational remembering often has this as its primary concern - the attempt to construct an acceptable, agreed, or communicatively successful version of what really happened" (1992, p. 210).
This postmodern approach to the study of memory is not without its critics (cf. Edwards, Potter, & Middleton, 1992; with replies by Baddeley, 1992; Hyman, 1992; Neisser, 1992; and others). The main thrust of the critique is that it does matter what really happened. To manage the present or survive the future, we often need an honest account of the past. Even when no such account is available, we must still believe that the past consisted of some definite set of events that have had specific consequences for the present. Otherwise, why would we think of the present
as having consequences for the future? How would wild fabrication be different from sober report? Perhaps most important, how would false allegations and accusations differ from those that are true?
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