The term “narrative self” refers to the idea that the sense of the self is mediated through narrative. In other words, you experience your “self,” your identity, through the stories that you tell about who you are. That collection of narratives includes stories you have told about your own abilities and experiences, but also stories about you that you have internalized from others. The audience of these stories isn’t just other people; it’s also us. We understand ourselves through the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

I often use the metaphor of a mosaic to draw attention to the complexity of the narrative self: From a distance, the mosaic appears to be a single, coherent “picture,” but the closer you get, the more you realize that that overall picture is composed of small, juxtaposed tiles. Similarly, your identity “from a distance” — meaning, for instance, when we go about our daily lives — may seem like a single story, but when we examine that story more closely, we find a number of more or less discrete stories held together by the relationship we have to them. Unlike the mosaic, however, the narrative self is constantly “under construction” — not to mention the fact that “the story” can’t really be ”told“ because it hasn’t ended.

This notion of the narrative self raises some interesting philosophical issues, and one of the more significant is why these narratives are necessary to begin with? So, let me start with a simple-looking question: Can you know who you are without the stories you tell yourself about who you are?

One way to approach this question is through Kant’s notion of the transcendental ego. This term doesn’t mean anything occult; rather, it refers to an argument in the famously convoluted Critique of Pure Reason that the “I” that is the subject of knowledge can never be the object of its own knowledge. Why not?

To examine these questions, let’s take a simpler version of this claim, straight from They Might Be Giants: “I’ll never see myself in the mirror with my eyes closed.” (“Dead,” from Flood, 1990) Think it over: You want to see yourself, so you pick up a mirror. You may think you’re “looking at yourself” in the mirror, but you’re not. Rather, it’s a look at a reflection of you — in two senses. First, it’s reflected in the sense that it’s bouncing off the mirror back to you, so it’s not a direct look; but it’s also reflected in the sense that it’s reversed. So you aren’t seeing yourself in the mirror in the way you see another person, “directly” or “with your own eyes.” What you are seeing with your own eyes is the reflection — but not you.

So you try to get around this problem by taking a selfie with your phone. But then you realize it’s the same problem: You’re seeing a pic with your own eyes, but you’re not seeing you with your own eyes.

In each case, what you want is to see yourself, but what you see when you try is an image of yourself. You genuinely see the image, but the image isn’t genuinely you — it’s you once removed. And that’s Kant’s basic point: As the “knower” of what I know, I can know what is known by me, but I can never know myself directly as the knower. The I of my experience can never turn around quickly enough to catch myself in the act of catching myself (in the act of catching myself, in the act. . .). You get the idea. But if this is the case, then how can we know ourselves?

In a sense, the answer is that we can’t. We can see the self that is reflected back to us in images of ourselves, but what we can’t do is see ourselves directly — because we’re always already out of reach. We can only know who we are by knowing ourselves as objects of knowledge — images. But those images, those “objects,” are always different from the knower that is trying to know itself. Faced with the impossibility of directly knowing myself as the knower of who I am, I need “reflections” of myself to get closer to knowing who I am. And that’s why I can’t experience a sense of who I am without narrative reflections to tell me who I am. But this also illustrates how important those reflections are for our self-awareness.

This has enormous philosophical significance for a sense of identity. The known is never “just a fact.” What is known always bears marks of the knower: Who, under what conditions, with what motivations, etc. There are no absolute facts floating around; there is knowledge, of course, but all knowledge is produced by someone, for something, under some specific conditions. If for no other reason, our perspective changes with the passage of time — and hence we know differently now than we did then, which means that what we know is different, too.

Some people will rejoice at this line of thought and claim that it “proves” that all knowledge is merely fiction. To those people, I offer an experiment you can perform at home (with care): Take a moment to relax, take a few deep breaths, and then tell yourself that you are 8 feet tall. Or 8 inches. Or that you were born the same year as Kant. Now look around: How much changes as a result of your “fictions”?

You get the idea. Most of us aren’t surprised to learn that “retelling” the story of your relationship to the world didn’t spontaneously transform the world to match. This means that at least some things are given to us by the world, and the rational thing to do is accept and respect them.

But if you’re inclined to rejoice in the other direction and embrace the claim that everything about who we are is determined in that way, guess again: A great deal of our sense of who we are can and does change. And if you’re inclined to disbelieve this, then take a trip through memory lane and consider how you understood the world and your place in it when you were in kindergarten. Or if you prefer, consider the decisions you made that you consider “life-changing”: What, exactly, changed, if who you are is already determined?

So, this is our problem — and it’s an indelible feature of the human condition: When we want to know ourselves, we have only reflections, images once-removed, and it’s hard to tell what is given and can’t be changed from what can be shaped by what we decide and believe. This condition is intellectually and emotionally challenging, but it offers us possibilities for change and growth.

And that is what narrative self analysis is all about.