Imagine remembering something you once did with pride, and feeling, years later, that the person in the memory is not you. Not that you have changed your mind, but that you have grown so ethically distant from your former self that the memory itself becomes alienating to hold. This is the condition Line Ryberg Ingerslev and Dorothée Legrand call a destructive memory, and their central claim is that ordinary moral change over a lifetime can produce it.
Why this matters: autobiographical memory is usually treated as the thread that binds a self together across time. If the ethical outlook that once made a memory feel like ours can drift far enough to make that same memory feel foreign, then the continuity of the self is not guaranteed by memory alone. It can fracture from the inside, without amnesia or injury.
The argument builds on the philosopher Bernard Williams and his idea of the relativism of distance, which he used to describe outlooks so far removed from ours that they are neither genuinely available to us nor open to real confrontation. Ingerslev and Legrand extend that idea inward, from distant cultures to one's own earlier life. They ask whether a prior ethical outlook can become so distant from a present one that memories from that earlier point begin to feel alienating. Their worked example is the writer Christa Wolf, whose life they read as exhibiting exactly this ethical incoherence between past and present selves. From that case they argue that language can play a constructive role in living with such memories.
The honest limits are considerable. This is a philosophical and phenomenological paper, not an empirical study. There is no experiment, no data, no measurement of how many people experience their memories this way. The support rests on conceptual argument and a single interpreted case, Christa Wolf, and the strength of the account depends on whether that reading is plausible rather than on anything that could be counted or replicated. The authors themselves note that the claim would fail if ethical change produced no phenomenologically distinct alienation, or if the Wolf case, read closely, does not show the features they attribute to it.
What the paper opens, rather than settles, is a question about the nature of the self it presumes. If a memory can remain vivid and accurate while ceasing to feel like mine, then owning a past may be less a matter of recall than of ethical endorsement, an act performed in the present and possibly, as the authors suggest, in language. Whether the self who narrates is the same self who remembers is left standing as a live question.
Source: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-026-10205-8