How Your Story Holds You Together

Standard theories of personal identity, whether psychological or biological, each face serious challenges. In this lecture, Marya Schechtman presents an alternative: the narrative approach, which she has defended in her own work. The core idea is that persons organize and experience their lives through a largely implicit self-narrative, one that operates in the background and gives meaning to what is happening in the present. Schechtman explains how this view responds to Derek Parfit's radical rejection of identity and draws on the model of living organisms to illustrate how identity can be holistic rather than reducible to a single criterion. She explores how children learn to narrate themselves, how the same moment can feel different depending on the story it belongs to, and how narrative connects us to our future selves in ways that ground both self-interest and moral responsibility. The lecture closes by acknowledging key challenges facing the narrative approach, which Schechtman promises to address in the next installment.