Psychological Disorders and Autobiographical Memories: Examining Memory Specificity, Affective Content, and Meaning-Making

This chapter offers a definition of healthy autobiographical memory within a larger framework of narrative identity. Healthy memory consists of memory specificity, a greater emphasis on positive affective content, and the capacity to engage in meaning-making based on memory narratives. Research on several major psychological disorders is reviewed for evidence of impairment in any of these three aspects of autobiographical memories, with particular emphasis on their disruption in “self-defining memories.” The findings demonstrate how severe psychological illness negatively impacts the most fundamental aspects of narrative identity with regard to experiential awareness, emotion regulation, and a coherent sense of self. In this way research into the subjective experience of narrative identity, autobiographical memory, and its disruption in psychological disorders gives researchers and clinicians a much more powerful sense of the phenomenological impact and massive assault on well-being rendered by major psychological and neuropsychiatric disorders. By taking the subjective experience of these disorders into account, the roles of self and memory in the research and treatment of these disorders are clarified.