Just what this cake will taste like may still be unknown, but it does seem possible that the study of the self or psyche, that is, psychology, can once again be fruitfully brought back into history. This is happening from both directions at once: neuroscientific studies demonstrate the importance of narrative, memory, and time to the sense of self; and historical studies show that the sense of personhood varies over time. The border between psychology and cognitive neuroscience is one of the most exciting domains of interdisciplinary research in the new century and that research is already having an impact on the other social sciences and on literary studies. Since memory and time play such important roles in the development of new models of self and mind–body interaction, there is no reason that history should not be involved in these developments. Memory not only constitutes and continually reconfigures the narrative self but also provides the link between the minimal and narrative self. Memory and narrative processing also connect the individual self to society, culture, and history. While biology may not provide an infinite array of possible ways to fashion the relations between emotion, reason, body, and self, it is certainly true that we have only begun to explore the ways in which culture and society channel their various expressions.
Although neuroscience has shown that the self is not a linguistic illusion and not an arbitrary product of cultural learning, it cannot by itself explain how the self gets its specific cultural and historical content. It can show, for example, that certain brain functions are necessary to the individual's insertion in society, but it cannot account for the ways individuality varies in different times and cultures. Neuroscience can try to locate the specific brain abnormalities that cause autism, for example, and it can show that autism entails an inability to understand subjectivity as well as to produce narratives. But it does not explain why subjectivity or narrative is understood differently in different times and places or for that matter why autism was only identified as a specific syndrome in the 1940s.
Anthropologists and cross-cultural psychologists have been actively investigating the ways that cultures differ in their attribution and development of personhood. In an essay that reviews much of the current work in this domain in anthropology, Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart argue that their colleagues should resist applying terms such as person, self, and individual as if they were valid universally and instead examine indigenous categories. Their study of noman in Papua New Guinea, a term which can mean mind, intention, will, agency, social conscience, desire or personality, demonstrates the power of this approach. Noman is not exactly translatable as self because it comes out of a local worldview that gives great weight to social interactions not only with other persons but also with the environment and with ancestors and ghosts. Understanding its cultural use, rather than just trying to fit it into Western notions of selfhood, has the effect of expanding the notion of personhood in new directions.35
A similar kind of ethnographic attitude has developed in historical studies of personhood. In his study of the “Production of the Self during the Age of Confessionalism,” for instance, David Sabean insists that sixteenth-century German notions of selfhood differed in fundamental ways from those familiar in the modern period. “Neither the peasants in Württemberg in the 1580s nor Luther,” he maintains, “thought of the self as a consistent center of awareness with memory as the instrument for organizing that sense of personal unity.”36 Memory was embedded in social relations, and the self was viewed as non-consistent and decentered. Rather than presuming that people in the past had less developed or “immature” practices and concepts of personhood compared to those of the present, historians now increasingly treat past societies as indigenous cultures with their own logics of personhood. Caroline Bynum, for example, argues that medieval writing about body and self is not so undeveloped in comparison to our own. Careful reading of medieval theologians reveals that the current notions of an embodied self have more in common with medieval views than with those of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers. Moreover, medieval renditions of the mind/body problem can actually help modern thinkers move away from their preoccupation with gender and sexuality and their consequent neglect of such issues as death and work.37
Cognitive neuroscience has revealed how inadequate our own folk psychology is for explaining personhood, but it too is still caught up in many “folk” assumptions of the present day, including the deeply misleading assumption that the individual brain is like Robinson Crusoe, isolated and asocial.38 A historical perspective, like an anthropological one, can help illuminate the working of those “folk” assumptions, both in the past, and by implication, in the present. By refocusing on the self, a topic that has once again popped up from under the surface of our everyday preconceptions, historians can not only reinvigorate their own scholarship but also help reshape an important interdisciplinary conversation. They can help make self, mind, and consciousness a more explicit part of historical understanding.