Editorial: Self and memory: A multidisciplinary debate.

Our Research Topic aims at collecting interdisciplinary contributions concerning the self, autobiographical memory, and notably their functional and dysfunctional interactions. We shall also pay special attention to papers reflecting on the role of personal relationships in constructing the sense of self and determining the quality of autobiographic narratives. Philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists, but also anthropologists and social scientists, have proposed various processes of self-construction and have often envisaged the topic of defense mechanisms. This is an important point, as the final goal of the debate is not only theoretical, but also practical: to better understand the nature of the self and its relationships with life stories and narrative-autobiographical capacities cannot but have a fundamental impact in clinical psychology, a context in which patients are often persons having lost the fluidity of self-memory interaction. To propose just a few examples, some important questions to handle with are: Are there any conditions (most notably-relational conditions) favoring a better self-memory interaction and, consequently, a more coherent autobiographic memory? Or, to consider the neuropsychological domain, the old, Lockean question still remains valid: what should be said of a self having lost its memory? And, conversely: what should be said of a self having lost the sense of his own body? To put it in other words: does bodily self-awareness -- namely the capacity to form a bodily image of oneself as an entire object, and simultaneously taking this image as a subject -- have any role in development of psychological self-consciousness?