Moments, Attachment and Formations of Selfhood

Dancing with Now

Kelly Forrest

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781349453153, 9781137300560
• eBook ISBN: 9781137300577
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy
• Index: Psychology

Using innovative empirical data, this book presents a unique approach to looking at moments, exploring the deeper meanings of why memories stand out and how they influence an individual's sense of self. Forrest challenges the privileged position of narrative coherence as the basis for healthy identity and formations of selfhood.

Part I

The Journey

Abstract: The reader is taken on a journey alongside the author’s evolving relationship to the Moments project, an empirical study of the moments people remember from their lives. Moments are first introduced as a scholarly object of inquiry related to contemporary issues in the field of narrative identity. As the moments are collected and analyzed, however, a different relation to the moments emerges, a relation that explores the decontexted experience of moments, not as indicative of traumatic fragmentation, but as a normative phenomenon and a viable, although neglected, mode of healthy identity formation. Moments are viewed from their characteristic of having an inherent coherence in contrast to narrative meanings that are products of a construction process.

Forrest, Kelly. Moments, Attachment and Formations of Selfhood: Dancing with Now. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137300577.

Forty-four people, ages 18 to 61, shared up to three moments from their lives as part of a research project. Each person was affiliated with the University of Washington, Tacoma (UWT) community, as student, faculty, staff, and/or alumni. Their participation was voluntary. Moments were described as follows:

We are studying moments that people remember as being important in their life and we are calling them moments that matter. A moment has a very short duration, up to about 10 seconds. You can think of a moment like a snapshot of experience. Moments that matter may be any type of experience. It could be a moment of realization, sharing something with someone, or sensing the warmth of the sun on your face. These are only examples, the moments that may come to mind for you may be similar to these or different from them. It may be a positive experience, a negative experience, or one that is neutral. What is important is that the moment comes to you when you think of moments that stand out for you, even if you don’t know why.

We collected a total of 120 moments.

Why ask about moments? Certainly, we can remember salient moments from our lives, and it is kind of cool to think about those moments, but why research them? The first question I had was a phenomenological one, what are the moments people are remembering from their lives. The study of moments is growing, particularly in the therapeutic context, but in these studies, the types of moments have been pre-selected by researchers. Selected moments have included moments of misunderstanding (Rhodes et al., 1994), moments of sadness (Henretty et al., 2008), significant change moments (Helmeke and Sprenkle, 2000), problematic reaction points (Watson and Rennie, 1994), and helpful therapist interventions (Elliott et al., 1985). Outside the therapeutic context, the research is more sparse and diverse. As a sampling, pre-selected types of moments include moments of death (Donnelly and Michael, 2006), moments of wives’ realization following husbands’ diagnoses with HIV/AIDS (D’Cruz, 2003), “aha” moments in life-coaching (Longhurst, 2006), and moments of alienation in self-injurious behavior (Schoppmann, Schröck, and Schnepp, 2007).

Remarkably, though, no one has asked people in a research context what moments they remember from their lives, regardless of the type of moment. From all the experiences we have everyday, what will characterize the moments that people are remembering?

Moments tend to form around experiences that “break through the ordinariness or violate expected smooth functioning” carrying a sense of consequence or engagement with the world (Stern, 2004, p. 34). Such moments are evident in the names they have been given, including a defining moment, a moment of truth, or a weird moment. Yet, moments can also be more ordinary, such as a moment of warmth on one’s face, or realizing there is no butter in the refrigerator. Moments emerge spontaneously, coming into being as the moment is lived. They are formed implicitly, outside of awareness, but enter into conscious awareness.

This understanding of moments accords well with what is known about memory processes (for a review, see Siegel, 1999). Each lived experience has an initial impact on the brain, termed an engram. This engram links together various levels of experience: semantic (factual), autobiographical (your sense of yourself at the time), somatic (what your body felt like at the time), perceptual (what things looked like), emotional (your mood), and behavioral (what you were doing with your body). The first two types of experience are labeled explicit or declarative memory because they can be accessed in conscious awareness. Explicit semantic memory brings with it the subjective experience of recall or noetic awareness. Noetic awareness is characterized by knowing factual information, such as knowing that one took a trip to Europe last year. Explicit autobiographical recall adds the element of a sense of self in time or autonoetic awareness, such as recalling one’s subjective experience of the trip. The remaining types of experience, such as perceptual or emotional, are termed implicit memory. When implicit memory is reactivated, it does not bring with it a sense of self, time, or that something is being recalled; it creates only the mental experience of perception or emotion. Such experiences are the foundation for a sense of self. The original experience includes linkages connecting each of the forms of explicit and implicit representation. Recall of an experience, however, is not just the reactivation of the associated elements of the original engram; rather, it is reconstructive, including features of the engram, together with elements from other experiences, and influences from one’s present state of mind. Further, how an experience is recalled in the past affects how it will be recalled in the future because of the neural association that functionally links the activity of the neurons.

Research on the neuroscience of memory suggests that emotionally significant experiences create stronger, more durable memories (for a review, see McGaugh, 2003). But, what types of momentary experiences carry emotional significance? Will they be connected to significant life events, such as birth, death, marriage, or divorce? Will they be experiences that challenge or transcend our ability to understand, such as mystical or religious experiences? Will they be characterized by moments of self-realization or mutual understanding, or connected to pivotal moments of change? Will there be moments that partake more of the everyday? Will the moments that people remember tend to be intersubjective, self-reflective, or perception-based, and will they be from an individual’s recent or more distant past?

I was also interested in the extent to which moments are integrated into identity or a sense of self? Personal narratives have been tightly linked with the sense of self and the construction of identity (Giddens, 1991; McAdams, 1993). Would these shorter duration moments that people are remembering be part of personal stories or would some of them be left, like edited frames of a film, isolated and unstoried experiences? If so left, would they represent only incoherent fragments of traumatic experiences? There is considerable scholarship regarding the fragmentary nature of traumatic memory and I had questions whether non-traumatic memory might also be retained in memory without being integrated into a well-organized narrative.

One salient debate regarding the construction of self/identity in narrative is that of the relative contribution of the individual versus society (McAdams, Josselson, and Lieblich, 2006). The differing perspectives that exist in the narrative literature regarding this issue have been tentatively organized along a continuum (Smith and Sparkes, 2008). At one pole, there are theories that give more weight to the individual and relatively less weight to socio-cultural factors. Theories falling under this perspective are labeled interpersonal. At the other pole, there are theories, labeled performative, in which the self loses its individuality to a greater degree to the social-cultural-historical milieu in which it lives. At the midpoint between the poles is the intersubjective perspective wherein the self and the social/relational nature of the world carry equal weight in self/identity construction.

Thus, I was interested in the extent to which people were sharing their moments with others. If moments are reported to have an impact on self/identity construction and are not being shared as part of larger self-narratives, this would suggest a role for the individual in self/identity construction. It also raises the issue whether moments, given their shorter duration and focus on subjective phenomenal experience, partake more of raw experience and less from the socio-cultural discourses that are, to some relative degree, influencing our self-narratives.

A second debate in the narrative literature concerns the issue of unity or multiplicity of self (McAdams, Josselson, and Lieblich, 2006). Some theorists argue that life stories serve an integrative, unifying function, bringing different aspects of the self together into a coherent whole (Erikson, 1963; McAdams, 1985). Others assert contemporary social life is too complex and inconsistent to allow for an integrated identity and suggest that narratives are multivoiced, often including conflicting images of self (Hermans, 1996; Hermans, 2001).

If individuals have included remembered moments into their narratives, it would point to the attention people are giving to this integrative function, revealing an ongoing process of identity integration, as suggested by Erikson and McAdams. If moments conflict or are to some extent inconsistent with one’s sense of self, then regardless of an integrating process that may be underway, the results would also provide support for viewing the self as a multiplicity (Hermans, 1996), at least at any given point within the lifespan.

These questions guided the construction of the interview in which each subject was asked to share up to three moments, the degree to which each moment had influenced their thinking, feeling, behavior, or their self, and whether their moments had been shared with others and in what contexts. Subjects were also asked which of the moments they remembered was most important, whether they discerned any relation between their moments, and what their experience was during the interview.

During the interviewing process, however, something different began to emerge, a different awareness, or better yet, a different relation to the project. The subjects in this study were sharing moments that, prior to that time, many had shared with only an intimate few, and some with no one else. At times, I felt like a voyeur, witnessing intimacies without the relational connection and depth that such sharing generally entails. I also began to feel oddly somewhat like a honeybee, going from human flower to human flower, receiving the essences of what had been culled from lifetimes of experience, a kind of human nectar.

The research project, or more accurately my relationship to the project, began to seem a bit coarse in relation to the intimacy and reality of the human experiencing I was being privileged to witness. I realized, after some time, that I was addressing an issue of ethics, of responsibility. How to be with these moments? How do I present them, order them, context their description to lessen, to the extent possible, the encounter with, what the Irish call, cold eyes, including my own? To what extent would any such contexting or interpretation contribute to such an encounter? Academic scholarship has a tendency to veil lived experience within a web of discipline-specific language and theorizing while simultaneously, apparently, intending its revelation. I didn’t want that for these moments; there was something about them that I didn’t want to shroud with whatever critical apparatus I brought to bear to satisfy the requirements of scholarship, or at least my understanding of those requirements.

As I moved into analyzing the data, this feeling did not abate, but rather it broadened and deepened. I began to feel a kind of paralysis about how to move forward. Somehow this research was triggering something in me, something important, something underneath the conditioned layers of my academic training. It was something about what the moments were saying about how to live, something that was different from what I had been doing all my life.

To gain a sense of this, imagine, if you will, climbing up and standing atop a twenty-foot telephone pole. You can imagine footholds and being harnessed in if that helps, but what becomes increasingly salient as you settle both feet on the small flat surface that is the top and attempt to stand upright, is that you have nothing to hold onto. But, due to the increased field of vision from this viewpoint and perhaps some measure of pride for the climb, you think this really wouldn’t be so difficult if the pole would just stop shaking.

Doubtless there are few of us who have actually had this literal experience, but doubtless also that few cannot relate to the feelings of uncertainty that arise when, for whatever reason, the ground beneath our feet begins to move. In a world in which mathematics has lost its certainties (Kline, 1980) and the histories and landscapes of our searching for understanding have led to global climate change, political polarities, genocides, financial bankruptcy, and countless endangered species, there seems little doubt that something is amiss.

In this metaphor, the pole represents our understanding of ourselves and the world. We stand at what always is the top and can look back or down to some major footholds within the history of meaning and value in western thought (for a review, see Angell and Helm, 1988). This is, of course, just another story, with all its flaws, gaps, and interpretations, but we will get to that a bit later.

In the late 1800’s, we stood shaking our heads before the Michelson-Morley experiments that showed incredulously that the earth had no motion, that is, the earth was the anachronistic, Ptolemaic, stationary center of the universe. With another step, with Einstein’s general and special theories of relativity, we realized the earlier difficulty. There were no optical or mechanical experiments that any observer could perform to determine whether one is at rest or in uniform or accelerated motion (Angell and Helm, 1988, p. 452). The picture of the world under the visible ground was changing as well. Classical mechanics gave way to quantum mechanics as the view of solid subatomic particles changed to that of complex forms of energy. Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy set the pole shaking at the submicroscopic level, leading scientists to rely on the statistical reliability found in the study of large groups, thus glossing over the minutest of shakings that only the severest of those with motion sickness might find problematic.

In philosophy, we have sought for stable ground as well, identifying universal ideals in the mind (idealism), holding fast to the physical nature of all substances (materialism), or discovering permanence in the relationships between things (structuralism). We have variously understood that sense data is immediately pressed on our minds (empiricism), that sense data is mediated by innate cognitive structures (rationalism), that the underlying innate structure is an economic one (Marx), or that everything has the structure of language (Saussure). We have retreated from dogma and sought meaning in the practical consequences resulting from any given idea and focused our attention on the production of results (pragmatism). We have reduced philosophy to logic and truth functions (realism-Russell), and have pruned philosophy to deny meaning to any language that could not be verified by the sciences or mathematics (logical positivism). We have shaken off the illusions of abstract systems to return focus to the self (existentialism) and hailed the discovery of meaning within the interplay of difference (poststructuralism). Currently, it appears, we are engaging our resources to excavate beneath our feet to ascertain how we construct the ground upon which we stand and interpret, explain, or transform it (critical theory).

Narrowing the focus to the social sciences, the views have ranged from the more materialistic/mechanistic, in which humans are little more than stimulus-response automatons (behaviorism) and consciousness is identical with brain states (neurosciences), to the more humanistic stances, which focus on the individual. We have understood ourselves as in some inherent conflict with others (Freud) or with ourselves (Jung), or rested the root of our conflicts on problematic childhood experiences (object-relations). Within this range, emphases have been lain on a myriad of factors, including observables, the unconscious, creativity, and experience.

At this point, I am reminded of a summer three years ago sitting on the grass in the backyard of a friend. Connor, a 3-legged golden retriever and absolute lover of golf balls, is on his haunches chewing on one particular ball that looks as if it contains all possible delights. He is rolling the ball against the sides of his cheeks, chomping on it, maneuvering it with his tongue from side to side. He drops the ball from his mouth and braces it against his front leg and gnaws some more. He raises his neck to keep the ball from rolling forward beyond the reach of his paws. His breath keeps time with his jaw, in breath, jaw open, out breath, jaw closing, in, out, open, close. Then, he drops it in front of him and pants. He seems satisfied. Are we?

Perhaps, as many have suggested, we are searching for meaning. The motivations or sources of our searching have been thoughtfully categorized by Ford (2007). We seek orientation and identity through story (mythic mind), permanence and stability through form (philosophic mind), and predictability and control through an understanding of causation (scientific mind). We search for “a renewed sense of wonder in this world” (religious naturalism), “a timeless and universal basis for value and orientation” (metaphysics), or “a human universal source of meaning, identity, and stability” (archetypal psychology). We also seek to undermine “monolithic forms of thoughts and experiences” (postmodern mind) and to “accommodate pluralism and the limitations of intentional, instrumental thought” (pragmatism). We may or may not notice that the question of meaning arises from a position of separation between what is and what ought or could be, between meaning and meaninglessness, as the price we pay for self-consciousness (Ford, 2007).

It seems what is needed is some foundation that can move with each moment, but still serve as a foundation. Perhaps on the shifting seas of our thinking, we might build a boat? But, this metaphor quickly collapses. How do we create such a “structure?” Can there be only one structure? Is it a structure? Is it a state of body, of mind, of understanding the relations between each? Is it about understanding at all? Must each person find that space, state, center, process, experience, or context that allows a sense of equilibrium within the uncertainty? Or must this process be taken collectively, one with another? Is there one or are there many such spaces, states, centers…? How do we find the explanation that replaces our uncertainty (Spence, 1982)? In every object that I see, in every thought I have, in every theory in which I find some truth, lives a grasping or rejecting of another object, another thought, another truth, another story. Do I use what I have learned, my experience, to shape or direct my future (Pillemer, 2003) and continuously revise my identity (Giddens, 1991)? But, if I use my past experience to guide my future, aren’t I limited by that past? Isn’t even the horizon of my imagination limited by that past? The field...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I  The Journey
• Part II  Moments
• Part III  Responding to Narrative Psychology
• References
• Index