Identity theories

At Slate, Robert Alter examines Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana:

"Our general cultural assumption, however, not only since Freud but at least since the Romantic movement, is that a vital connection with the past is essential to an integrated sense of self in the present. Eco does not question this view. For him, as for Wordsworth, "the child is father to the man," and so he sets in motion the man at the center of his novel on a quest to exhume the child buried within him. Eco's protagonist, who possesses only texts ("paper memory," as he calls it), embarks on a project of recovering his lost past through texts. With the encouragement of his wife, Yambo goes off to the country house where he spent a good part of his childhood. In the attic there, he discovers a treasure trove of textual and material objects that he assumes must have enchanted him as a child—comic books, adventure stories, old magazines and newspapers (the period in question is the late '30s and early '40s), posters, movie stills, decorative cocoa tins, old records in their original jackets, and much more....
...Yambo's discoveries in the boxes in the attic are reminiscent of the wonderful catalogue of miscellaneous objects in Leopold Bloom's drawer in the Ithaca section of Joyce's novel. The mind as a patchwork of disparate texts is very much evident both in Stephen (high culture) and in Bloom (popular culture). Yambo, like Bloom/Ulysses, is a man trying to get back home, and the last section of the novel is appropriately entitled, in Greek, The Nostos, the term for Odysseus' return to Ithaca. In the literally hallucinatory concluding pages of the book, Eco actually borrows Joyce's term "psychopomp." (It seems safe to assume that Geoffrey Brock's fine translation faithfully reproduces the Italian equivalent here.) Eco's own version of the psychedelic experience of Joyce's Circe episode, where the word occurs, is set at the end of the book as an attempted resolution of Yambo's dilemma.
But if we could really immerse ourselves in the juvenile literature that mesmerized us at the age of 8 or 10, would that in fact give us the key to our identity in the present?"