Eakin states that autobiography is not “something we read in a book,” but is also “a discourse of identity, delivered bit by bit, in the stories we tell ourselves day in and day out” It is also the story we tell others. It is ” an integral part of a lifelong process of identity formation”

And then there is the autobiography information about a NBC’s news anchorman. As reported in the NY TIMES on Sunday ” In his newscast on Wednesday, Mr. Williams said he had embellished an account of an incident in 2003; over the years he came to say that he was in a helicopter that was hit by enemy fire, an assertion he now says is not true. He now says he was in a trailing helicopter, and that he “conflated” the two aircraft. He made no mention of the matter during his newscasts on Thursday and Friday.”

What interest me was a psychological term he used “conflated” which I was reintroduced to in, The Story of a Shaking Women , but having a short term memory laps I can’t remember where in the book exactly.

On the other hand, even Wittgenstein criticized Freud’s of conflation regarding is merging   of reasons and causes, or confusing one for the other.

So the question in my mind is regardless of Eakin’s attempts to link autobiography with neurology and Damasio’s arguments about the the narrative being below consciousness I strongly suspect we all on occasion conflate our histories either maliciously, stupidly, or things just get mixed up in our imperfect brains and we just come to believe something be true until somebody questions us.Of course who is to say the person doing the questioning is remembering the right story?