The narrative self in schizophrenia and its cognitive underpinnings.

The narrative self gives people a sense of continuity, the feeling of being the same person across time, despite life’s many changes. In schizophrenia, there is a reduced sense of self-continuity which involves a feeling that the past self is not meaningfully connected to the present self. This aspect clearly emerges when schizophrenics are asked to tell their life stories: the narratives they produce are disorganized, present fewer levels of causal coherence and fewer events than those produced by the control groups. Cognitive theories of the narrative self suggest that self-continuity is achieved via different neurocognitive mechanisms. In this chapter, we will focus on one of these: mental time travel. MTT is the cognitive system that allows individuals to project themselves backwards and forward in time. It is composed of two closely related abilities: the ability to remember past experiences, or episodic memory, and the ability to imagine possible future experiences, or episodic future thinking. Investigations showed that patients with schizophrenia have impairments in both abilities: they exhibit a diminished capability to re-experience the past. We will provide arguments in favour of the idea that impairments in MTT are responsible for the reduced sense of self-continuity of schizophrenics and that this, in turns, affects their narrative self.