Autobiographical identity/self

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“Identity, the concept for the sense of who we are, is not only a construction but a reflexive construction. It embraces two or more constellations in time, which are to be connected” (Brockmeier, 2000, p. 53).

The autobiographical self is constructed through time modalities—how memories from the past and plans for the future can interact with the protoself and core self—and are thus “autobiographies made conscious” (Damasio, 2010, p. 210). The “life story jumps from the past to the future and back to the present… But the different modalities also are inextricably interwoven among each other (Brockmeier, 2000, p. 56). By bringing all time modalities into an autobiographical narrative, an individual thus narrates her autobiographical self in almost exactly the same way that it was constructed. As her autobiographical self changes, so does her autobiographical time; autobiographical narratives from different time points would differ not just by the addition of new events, but also by how an individual views her past memories, present self, and future projections. In this way, an individual’s concept of futurity would also be changed as she progresses through chronological time.