Università Roma Tre

This course aims to probe the ethical import of a personological view of self-narrativism that is well-entrenched in a naturalistic context. Against the backdrop of William James’ theory of the duplex self, the claim that we constitute ourselves as morally responsible agents (as ‘Lockean persons’) by forming and using autobiographical narratives is combined with Dan McAdams’ view of narrative identity as a layer of personality. During personality development, internalised and evolving stories of the self layer over other layers of personality, and this process of layering may be integrative. The process of self-representation originated from the I/Me dialectic, then, takes the form of what Jung identified as “individuation”, namely, a striving towards the unity of the various strata of personality. Such a process has an ethical dimension that is reminiscent of the ideal of eudaimonia, the discovery and actualization of one’s own unique potentials and talents.

1) J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Clarendon Press, Oxford 1975 (book II, ch. 27).
2) D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), 2nd ed., edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H. Niddich, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1978 (book I, part IV, sect. 6)
3) W. James, Principles of Psychology (1890), Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) 1981 (vol. I, chapters IX e X).
4) M. Di Francesco, M. Marraffa, A. Paternoster, The Self and its Defenses. From Psychodynamics to Cognitive Science, Palgrave-Macmillan, London 2016.
5) P. Fonagy, G. Gergely, E. Jurist and M. Target, Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self, Other Press, London 2002.
6) R.D. Laing, The Divided Self, Tavistock, London 1960.
7) A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Polity Press, London 1991.