Narrative Deference

This blog post is a write-up of a paper by project postdoc Ellie Byrne which was published in Topoi in September as part of a special issue entitled Scaffolding Bad: Varieties of Situated Cognitive Harm edited by David Spurrett, Giovanna Colombetti and John Sutton. 

When I worked on the project Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience (PI Matthew Ratcliffe) at York, we obtained hundreds of first-person testimonies from grieving people about their experiences. I think regularly about some of the things people wrote, but there’s one in particular I keep coming back to: “My childhood is now only remembered by me. I’m an only child. So that time seems completely inaccessible.” (#208)

To me, this quote drew attention to the extent to which having other people available to corroborate our memories influences how we understand ourselves. We do this all the time and all throughout our lives: we might ask our parents to corroborate some significant childhood experience of ours, or ask a sibling to confirm that we’ve remembered something correctly. Later in life, we may ask a friend to corroborate how we remember coping with a breakup or our partner to remind us of a certain order of events in a particularly busy period.

We also enlist others to fill in the gaps for things we do not remember well. We might not really remember much at all about these experiences; perhaps just diffuse ‘feelings’ associated with certain events. In such cases, we might end up pretty reliant on our friends, family and partners to tell us what happened, how we felt about what happened and how those feelings have shaped who we are today.

According to the philosopher Richard Heersmink, autobiographical memories are the building blocks of our autobiographical self-narratives. Heersmink, situating some of his work within the field of ‘distributed cognition’, has emphasised that since our memories are distributed between people, it makes sense to say that our self-narratives are too. In my paper, I followed Heersmink in drawing attention to the extent to which we can rely on others for our autobiographical self-narratives, and the ways that this can be both good and bad for us. My paper introduces a concept which I call ‘narrative deference’, defined as the phenomenon whereby one is more dependent upon another person for central aspects of one’s autobiographical self-narrative than on oneself.

As I started to present this idea at conferences and workshops, there was a consistent theme in Q&A discussions: each time, multiple people in the audience had thought of contexts in which this phenomenon is harmful. This led me to think about the phenomenon in terms of another one of my research interests: affective injustice.

Affective injustice scholar Shiloh Whitney connects affective injustice to a distinctively affective form of gaslighting, the phenomena whereby casting doubt on someone is the means through which they are made to doubt themselves: “in gaslighting, the way others respond to me begins to impair an aspect of my relationship to myself. In particular, the noncooperative response I receive from some second person(s) when I express my experiences to them begins to impair some aspect of my ability to make sense of my own experience to myself in the first person” (Whitney 2023, pp.31–32). 

Understood this way, we can see how the affective influence others have on us can be used to undermine our self-trust over time such that our autobiographical self-narrative possibilities are restricted. While gaslighting is primarily discussed in the context of romantic relationships, it is being increasingly recognised how gaslighting can also occur in healthcare settings.

In a variety of contexts, an ill person might narratively defer to another because it presents itself as the best immediate option. Perhaps narratively deferring to my parents allows me to maintain a coherent or desirable autobiographical self-narrative. Perhaps deferring to my doctor allows me to make sense of an otherwise overwhelming and confusing situation. Perhaps deferring to my partner prevents conflict and maintains my bond with the person who cares for me. This deference can surely help me to secure lots of things that are good for me, but my most fundamental sense of self is also made vulnerable by it.

I think there is a lot of interesting and important future work to be done in exploring how this phenomenon operates in both epistemic and affective injustices in healthcare.

Eleanor Byrne

Eleanor is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Birmingham and part of Project EPIC. She specialises in affective and existential dimensions of illness experiences, particularly Functional Neurological Disorders. She has worked on grief in illness and experiences of post-viral fatigue such as Long Covid. She is currently developing a project on phenomenology and functional seizures.