Autobiographical memory

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“Autobiographical remembering is a paradigmatic case of relating temporally distinct events and places. It is a back-and-forth movement between the past and the present that furthermore relates to the future, even if this might not always be evident” (Brockmeier, 2000, p. 54).

The autobiographical memory has been traditionally argued as the “internally stored knowledge of a ‘lived life,’ a knowledge which can be remembered and re-presented in hindsight in a more or less linear, coherent, and true life account” (Brockmeier, 2000, p. 52). However, because all memories undergo the process of encoding, consolidation, and recall, they are highly subjective to being rewritten. In looking at the autobiographical process as a “narrative construction” instead, the autobiographical memory is then an ordering of “our experiences, memories, intentions, hopes, desires, fears, and concerns in an autobiographical perspective” (p. 53). The autobiographical memory therefore becomes subjective to change not only by the accumulation of memories over a chronological timeline, but also by the weights that the individual signifies to each memory and how these affect the present and future self.