Abstract
All people are vulnerable to having their self-concepts shaped by others. This article investigates that vulnerability using a theory of narrative self-constitution. According to narrative self-constitution, people depend on others to develop and maintain skills of self-narration and they are vulnerable to having the content of their self-narratives co-authored by others. This theoretical framework highlights how vulnerability to co-authoring is essential to developing a self-narrative and, thus, the possibility of autonomy. However, this vulnerability equally entails that co-authors can undermine autonomy by contributing disvalued content to the agent’s self-narrative and undermining her authorial skills. I illustrate these processes with the first-hand reports of several women who survived sexual abuse as children. Their narratives of survival and healing reveal the challenges involved in (re)developing the skills required to manage vulnerability to co-authoring and how others can help in this process. Finally, I discuss some of the implications of co-authoring for the healthcare professional and the therapeutic relationship.
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Notes
Narrative self-constitution is compatible with there being non-narrative aspects to the self-conceptions of self-narrators such as representations of one’s body image, size, and shape. As Hilde Lindemann Nelson says, ‘autobiography…isn’t life. It’s a narrative structure that makes sense of life’ [8, p. 62].
A narrative also helps guide the agent’s attention. Without a narrative, the agent does not know what is most relevant and what can be shut out of attention so they become overwhelmed by possibilities. A loss of ability to self-narrate appears to characterise certain psychotic episodes which have been described as being trapped in a terrifying, stagnant present [13].
Karen Jones makes a similar point, ‘…in the stories we tell each other about what it is like to have an emotion of a particular kind, stories shape our understanding of what is to count as (romantic) love, what lovers do, what they feel, and who may be properly loved by whom’ [17, p. 270].
This co-authoring early in the agent’s life is necessarily general and relatively reliant on archetypes because the agent is only beginning to develop/reveal her unique qualities. It is disputed as to how much early co-authoring is appropriate. For example, some people think it inappropriate to assign a gender role until the child is mature enough to choose one. Wherever we should best set the boundaries for early co-authoring, the point here is that if one does not provide some co-authoring, the child will be unable to develop his or her nascent agency.
Perhaps certain aspects of a self-narrative could be self-constitutive even if they were incorrectly rejected by everybody. For my purposes, I only need it to be true that contested self-narration is much more difficult than verified self-narration.
Before the agent can narrate for herself, her self-narrative is socially verified by default, since it has been completely co-authored (setting aside the issue of conflicting material from different co-authors). However, there should be an analogous constraint on the co-authored narrative—to some extent, the co-authors should be waiting to see if what they have authored is subjectively verified by the agent. I return to this point below.
This view, therefore, has some similarity with Dan Dennett’s claim that ‘our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source’ [23, p. 418]. However, Dennett tends to slide into a more extreme position claiming that we never spin our own narratives. On the present view, although the agent is spun by her self-narrative to the extent that it departs from her evaluative stance, there is the possibility of bringing the narrative back in line with her evaluative stance. The amount of work that needs to be done to exercise this control increases when the self-narrative thread to be changed has been consistently socially verified over time.
In some cases, the agent might just resign herself to the fact that she disvalues certain aspects of her life because she does not believe that a more valued life is available to her. Jeanette Kennett [24] discusses this in relation to addiction.
I take these accounts from Kandie Allen-Kelly’s 2002 study [26], in which she listened to the stories of these women in once a week meetings over ten weeks.
All descriptions of these women are accurate at the time of the study in 2002.
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McConnell, D. Narrative self-constitution and vulnerability to co-authoring. Theor Med Bioeth 37, 29–43 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-016-9356-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-016-9356-x