La psychologie a toujours traité le comportement et l'expérience comme étant enchâssés dans un flux temporel unidimensionnel, « le courant du comportement » dans lequel les événements et les actions occupent des intervalles de temps qui ne se chevauchent pas. Pourtant, une analyse phénoménologique révèle que la structure de nos vies est bien plus riche et intéressante. En utilisant la notion de « quasidécomposabilité » de Herbert Simon, je décris cette structure comme un assemblage d'épisodes

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... asi-indépendants se réalisant de façon concurrente, et de nature asynchrone. Il s'agit d'une « structure profonde » des vies contrairement à la conception courante qui conçoit les vies comme « plates ». Abstract: Psychology has always treated behavior and experience as embedded in a unidimensional flow in time, the "stream of behavior". This means that events and actions occupy non-overlapping time-intervals in this stream. Nevertheless a phenomenological analysis reveals that the structure of lives is richer and far more interesting. Using Herbert Simon's notion of near-decomposability, I describe the structure of lives as a composite of nearly independent strands that run concurrently, and are asynchronous. This is a "deep structure" of lives in contrast to the current conception, which conceives of lives as "flat". In this article I contrast two conceptions of the structure of lives: the "stream of behavior" framework (which I call "flat") and the "concurrent strand" framework (which I call "deep"). The stream of behavior approach has a distinguished history, going back at least to William James. For example, William James writes about the stream of thought: "Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous" [James 1981, 220]. In contrast, according to the parallel strand framework, lives consist of multiple concurrent and asynchronous strands, each endowed with a rich structure.