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Thomas Fuchs
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Abstract
The concept of narrative identity implies a continuity of the
personal past, present and future. This concept is essentially Introduction: Narrative Identity
based on the capacity of persons to integrate contradictory
aspects and tendencies into a coherent, overarching sense ‘Man is the animal which is able to make promises’,
and view of themselves. In ‘mature’ neurotic disorders, this wrote Nietzsche [1] in his Genealogy of Morals. This
is only possible at the price of repression of important wish- means that man has an efficient memory which does not
es and possibilities for personal development. Patients with forget what he once said and did, and which enables him
borderline personality disorder lack the capacity to establish to project his wishes and purposes into the future. It also
a coherent self-concept. Instead, they adopt what could be means that he has an inner censor commonly called con-
called a ‘post-modernist’ stance towards their life, switching science that keeps a close watch on his promises and ob-
from one present to the next and being totally identified ligations lest they should be violated. On the other hand,
with their present state of affect. Instead of repression, their Nietzsche was worried about the question of whether this
means of defence consists in a temporal splitting of the self kind of historical memory bars us from happiness [2].
that excludes past and future as dimensions of object con- The beast, by living unhistorically, ‘closely tied to the peg
stancy, bonding, commitment, responsibility and guilt. The of the moment’ and not knowing about past or future,
temporal fragmentation of the self avoids the necessity of lives in simple happiness. For man, however, who is un-
tolerating the threatening ambiguity and uncertainty of in- able to forget, this kind of happiness remains for ever out
terpersonal relationships. The price, however, consists in a of reach.
chronic feeling of inner emptiness caused by the inability to Nietzsche’s doubts have been confirmed by Freud’s
integrate past and future into the present and thus to estab- pessimism regarding the progress of culture: the moral
lish a coherent sense of identity. The paper outlines the con- constraints and abdications which culture imposes on
cept of narrative identity and explores its disturbances in the individuals necessarily conflict with their quest for
References
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