Who am I? Big or small—shallow or deep?

Abstract

Mark Freeman’s and Elli Schachter’s commentaries on my target article “ Who am I? Narration and its contribution to self and identity” open up opportunities to clarify. In this response I differentiate more clearly between biographic approaches to narrative and my proposal to approach identity and self as dilemmatic spaces that are navigated by way of narrative practices. While Freeman and Schachter suggest an approach to identity by highlighting narrating as first-person (mental) operations of a solitary (self-) intending and (self-) reflecting individual, and identity research as inquiry into individuals’ reflections and intentions, I clarify my alternative: narrating as an interactive practice— an approach which accentuates narrative practices taking place as situated and contextualized second-person encounters within which identities and a sense of self emerge as navigations of three dilemmatic identity spaces. In addition, in this response to Freeman’s and Schachter’s commentaries I once more attempt to underscore the merits of a practice-based approach to narrating activities for empirical identity research.