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Master Narratives, Self-Simulation, and the Healing of the Self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2023

RYAN BOLLIER Open the ORCID record for RYAN BOLLIER [Opens in a new window]
RYAN BOLLIER*
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INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR ryan.j.bollier@gmail.com
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Abstract

Infiltrated consciousness occurs when a subject's sense of self comes to be strongly and negatively shaped by victimizing master narratives. Consider the stay-at-home dad who has internalized a harmful narrative of traditional masculinity and so feels ashamed because he is not the family's bread winner. One way master narratives infiltrate consciousness is through conditioning self-simulation by assigning a hierarchy of values to different social roles. Further, master narratives confine self-simulation by prescribing certain social roles to an individual and prohibiting others. One common suggestion for counteracting infiltrated consciousness is to transform it through membership in new communities with new master narratives. But how does such healing happen? This essay offers a response. Recent psychological research on constructivist theories of memory outlines a naturalistically plausible mechanism for self-simulation. I argue that this mechanism is implicated in transforming infiltrated consciousness. This clarifies features of our psychological architecture that make the alteration of self-concepts possible.

Keywords

moral psychologypersonal identityself-conceptssocial philosophyself-simulation
Type
Article
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , March 2024 , pp. 153 - 167
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Philosophical Association

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