What does it mean to be a person, a persona, a knowing subject? When a philosopher of bygone age like Suhrawardi puts his own knowing subject at the epicenter of his unknowing world, I find in that moment a moral and philosophical momentum in which I too can locate my own knowing subject at the epicenter of my own unknowing world. I therefore begin this book with a reading of Suhrawardi’s allegorical prose, where we see him telling us when the Former of Truth (Musavver-e beh Haghighat) wanted to create him; let us just say God wanted to create him. Suhrawardi is an Illuminationist philosopher and he speaks his own peculiar language. He created Suhrawardi as a falcon. Have you ever heard anything stranger, more astonishing, more beautiful, more miraculous? Who is talking here? By what authority, what audacity, does he talk this way? A falcon? Really? What happened to that authorial voice, that agential power with which philosophers like Suhrawardi talked? How did we get from there to here, when we are afraid of our own shadow, as my late mother used to say – may she rest in peace? I write as a product of a colonial world, with a postcolonial claim to my subjectivity, reclaiming the moment when I was de-subjected to re-subject myself, at the receiving end of a brutal history of domestic tyranny and foreign domination, who has still managed to stand up and say “I” and place a meaningful sentence in front of that authorial “I.” I wish to find out how did that happen. The fact that Suhrawardi said “I” long before I did has something to do with my “I” too – even or particularly when I write “I” in English in the shadow of his Persian “Man/I.” This book is about “Man/I.”

In Chapter 5, we present the defining characteristics of narrative, including temporal organization, protagonists pursuing goals, the landscapes of action and consciousness, and meaning as emerging from configuration of events. We argue that experience takes on certain of these defining features (lived story) and that telling stories is anchored in while also transforming lived story. We introduce narrative as crucial to identity since it supports self-continuity by organizing past, present, and future selves into coherent patterns. Further, we describe the memory, imagination, and reflection processes involved in the creation of narrative identity. Finally, we locate narrative identity in social and cultural contexts by introducing the concept of narrative ecology, which includes stories shared by others (vicarious stories), social scaffolding of storytelling, culturally shared stories, such as autobiographies, and master narratives. We discuss how a negative narrative ecology may play a role in shaping narrative identity in some individuals with psychopathology, including negative master narratives of mental illness, inaccurate stereotypes, silencing, absent or hostile coauthors, and lack of adaptive vicarious life stories.

In Chapter 14, we propose a framework for understanding the interplay between narrative identity, mental illness, and personal recovery. First, narrative identity may constitute a vulnerability to mental illness. If individuals grow up in a narrative ecology characterized by silencing, hostile coauthors, and/or maladaptive vicarious stories, they may struggle to narrate negative events in ways that support a positive view of themselves and others. When encountering stressful events, such vulnerable narrative identities may trigger symptoms in some individuals. Second, narrative identity is affected by psychopathology. Mental illness may disrupt the ongoing life story and give birth to the ill self, the negative self, and the self as different. Simultaneously, individuals may feel that they have lost their previous selves and the projected future becomes uncertain and bleak. Certain healthcare practices and negative master narratives may magnify this toxic change in narrative identity. Third, individuals may work with narrative identity to recover from the damage done by mental illness and negative narrative ecologies. We suggest that such narrative repair addresses the narrative identity costs presented in our analyses (e.g., fear of the ill self and the negative self) and boosts narrative identity resources (e.g., the growing, agentic, and dreaming selves).

In this first chapter, we present two main questions that we seek to answer by analyzing life stories from 118 individuals with severe mental illness: 1) What do life stories reveal about subjective consequences of suffering from mental illness and 2) What do life stories reveal about experiences bringing well-being when living with mental illness? We show how these questions touch upon themes in well-known autobiographies of authors with mental illness. Further, we discuss how answering these questions supplements diathesis-stress models by focusing on identity salient consequences rather than causes of mental illness, and on narrative identity as a source of well-being rather than symptom remission. We argue for the importance of life stories in fully comprehending the subjective side of mental illness. Finally, we provide a roadmap for the remaining chapters in the book.

The Introduction examines the academic history of the study of sectarianism among Western sociologists, concluding that the categories established by Weber and his students are not overly helpful in understanding the history of the Muslim firaq. It outlines a new methodology for their study: the narrative-identity approach, which posits that human beings emplot themselves in narratives in order to find meaning and orient themselves, and that sect narratives are some of the narratives that human beings might choose to emplot themselves within. This methodology focuses more on what sectarian actors do, and treats the grand sect narratives as narratives of salvation that offer meaning to those emplotted. It then moves to the sources of Muslim sect narratives, paying particular attention to the problematic genre of heresiography. It ends with a brief discussion of the structure of the work.

The conclusion reemphasizes some of the main points of the book: that sectarian identities are not fixed, but remain fluid and adaptable to different situations. As such, they present grand narratives that human beings can emplot themselves within, and orient themselves accordingly. The chapter also notes how sect and school narratives seem to encompass notions of salvation. Similarly, human beings might adapt and develop the grand narratives to fit their own situations, thereby contributing to the history and accumulating tradition of any given sect or school. The medieval figure of al-Ghazālī is given as an example of such a reformer.

We suggest studying how using social media affects adolescent identity development to understand the mechanism of the impact of social media on adolescent mental health. We present a model of the dual aspect of adolescent identity development – the progression towards the formation of self-evaluated commitments and values and construction of a coherent life story – and discuss how using social media facilitates or hinders processes involved, namely introspection, storytelling, and dialogue. Social media topics include dialogue with a diverse group of people, censorship, the permanence of social media data, potent social norms and values, and emphasis on appearance. Future research should develop methods for studying narratives on social media and establish the adolescent development of a narrative identity. We also suggest examining the affordances of social media platforms and how they affect processes of identity development. The chapter calls for media developers to design social media environments that support identity development.

In psychology, the concept of identity goes back to the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. However, in psychoanalysis the concept does not play a central role. Therefore, we provide a historical review of the implicit contributions of psychoanalysis to the concept in four steps, using Erikson’s work as the central reference point and suggesting a narrative and co-narrative conception of identity that acknowledges the interpersonal and social process character of identity based on a realist epistemological position. We review psychoanalytic contributions leading up to Erikson, especially that of his teacher Federn. We summarize Erikson’s concept of ego-identity, which served to extend a view of development driven by biological maturation and identifications to include sociocultural influences in adolescence and beyond. We identify six essential aspects of identity in his work and highlight his stress on adolescence as the cradle of identity and the life story. Object relations theory implicitly contributed to a view of identity springing from a matrix of others-with-self, but only Kernberg took up the concept of identity in a clinically relevant way. Later authors like Ogden and Ferro implicitly radicalized the interpersonal nature of identity by exclusively focusing on its moment-to-moment shifts in interaction. Finally, we argue for a narrative conception of identity, bending back to Erikson’s conception of identity as a life story that reaches beyond the couch, presenting an updated concept of narrative identity which is enriched by psychoanalytic developments of the past fifty years.

This chapter explores four approaches to personal identity in terms of numerical identity: person-based accounts, a biological account, a mind-based account, and a social account. We also introduce the concept of narrative identity, which involves a person’s self-conception or self-told story about their life. We argue, first, that person-based accounts and the social account are implausible accounts of numerical identity and, second, that both the mind-based and biological accounts are plausible. This motivates a pluralistic approach to personal identity in the sense that policies and practices should be consistent with both accounts. With these theoretical resources, we turn to three practical issues. First, we neutralize some concerns about human enhancement through biomedical means. Second, we investigate and ultimately vindicate the authority of advance directives in cases of severe dementia. Finally, we address the definition of death and associated questions about unilateral discontinuation of life support and vital organ procurement. Proper resolution of these issues turns primarily on practical considerations other than the nature of death.

This chapter offers a perspective on the long-running ethical debate about the nature and extent of responsibilities to return individually relevant research findings from health research to participants. It highlights the ways in which shifts in the research landscape are changing the roles of researchers and participants, the relationships between them, and what this might entail for the responsibilities owed towards those who contribute to research by taking part in it. It argues that a greater focus on the informational interests of participants is warranted and that, corollary to this, the potential value of findings beyond their clinical utility deserves greater attention. It proposes participants’ interests in using research findings in developing their own identities as a central example of this wider value and argues that these could provide grounds for disclosure.