The Intergenerational Self Subjective Perspective and Family History

S elf memory and autobiographical memory are inextricably tied. our experiences shape our developing self-understanding, and our self-understanding influences how and what we recall of our pasts in an ongoing dialectical relation (Conway, Singer, & Tagini, 2004), and this process occurs in social interaction (Gergen, 1994; hermans, 1996). Self both emerges from and contributes to ongoing social interactions, such that how we narrate our experiences with others shapes how we come to understand these experiences for ourselves (Fivush, Reese, & haden, 1996; Pasupathi, 2001). Through describing, explaining, and evaluating our pasts in socially situated reminiscing, we come to construct an interpretive framework for understanding both our experiences and our selves. Provocatively, our sense of self is not tied solely to personally experienced events. Who we are and how we understand our personal experiences is also shaped by how we understand others’ experiences. This is true in at least two senses. First, incorporating others’ perspectives on those experiences enriches understanding of our own past experiences; when we share experiences in reminiscing, we construct a more nuanced and more subjective perspective on our own past. Second, and perhaps more intriguing, hearing the experiences of others changes our perspective of our self. Stories of the past that we did not experience still provide powerful models, frameworks, and perspectives for understanding our own experiences. We construct a sense of self through time that relies both on an evaluative perspective of our own personal history, as well as how our history fits into larger cultural and historical frameworks. We are who we are because of what we have experienced and what we have been told; our sense of self is constructed from both personal history and the social cultural history in which our personal history is embedded.