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A modified version of Conway and Pleydell-Pearce's Self Memory System (SMS) account of autobiographical memory and the self is introduced. Modifications include discussion of a fundamental tension between adaptive correspondence (experience-near sensory-perceptual records of goal activity) and self-coherence (a more abstracted and conceptually-rich long-term store of conceptual and remembered knowledge). This tension is examined in relation to each SMS component-the episodic memory system, long-term self, and the working self. The long-term self, a new aspect of the model, consists of the interaction of the autobiographical knowledge base and the conceptual self. The working self, depending on goal activity status, mediates between episodic memory and the long-term self. Applications of the SMS to personality and clinical psychology are provided through analysis of self-defining memories and adult attachment categories, as well as case histories of traumatic memory. The SMS's role in imagination is examined through a brief discussion of Wordsworth's poetry.
In the Borges (1998) story, "Funes, his memory," Ireneo Funes, after a fall from a horse, finds that he has lost all capacity to forget any experience past or present. Confined to his bed, he literally remembers everything:
The truth was, Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree in every patch of forest, but every time he had perceived or imagined the leaf. He resolved to reduce every one of his past days to seventy thousand recollections, which he would then define by numbers. Two considerations dissuaded him; the realization that the task was interminable, and the realization that it was pointless. He saw by the time he died he would still have not finished classifying all the memories of his childhood. (Borges, 1998, p. 136)
Overwhelmed and aging prematurely, Funes dies at the age of 21 of pulmonary congestion, drowned by the flood of his own recollections.
The fictional character of Funes captures a fundamental theme that guides this paper's exploration of the relationship of autobiographical memory to the self. Specifically, we assert that autobiographical memory emerges from the intersection of two competing demands - the need to encode an experience-near record of ongoing goal activity and the simultaneous need to maintain a coherent and stable record of the self's interaction with the world that extends beyond the present moment. The first...