I had been musing about memory before this degree and thinking quite a bit about it while doing my practice since then. I started reading about it only a few weeks ago, and guess what, lots of other have been having similar thoughts, and much deeper, for a long time. In 1690 John Locke is reported to have wondered, “suppose I wholly lose the memory of some parts of my Life, beyond a possibility of retrieving them, so that perhaps I shall never be conscious of them again. yet am I not the same Person, that did those actions, had those Thoughts, that I was once conscious of, though I have now forgot them?”
I had a stroke nearly 10 years ago, and my first thought, when my head cleared was, is my brain still working and is my memory intact too?
“Where is the personality rooted, where is the soul? Let’s get really heavy on this. Where does our sense of self come from? If a person is brain-damaged, you get a man, some reasonable father and husband, and he has a head injury and he comes out wicked and bad-tempered, he’s got no insight, his personality s never the same, When he goes to heaven does he go as Mr. Pre Bump On The Head or Mr. Post Bump On The Head? And it’s a very profound question about who we are and where our sense of self comes from. People have a view that during the lifespan from birth to death there’s where we become an optimum human being, a grown-up, But there isn’t it’s a cycle.” (Grant, 1999) P267.
In her final years my mother suffered from Alzheimer’s. My father died, aged 92, in 2013, his end brought on, I’m sure, through looking after my mother. When we told her he had died, she broke down. Ten minutes later, she asked where he was. At first we told her again that he had died and she went through the trauma again, and so did we. We were dreading the next repetition, so we resolved to tell her a suitable story to prevent us all being hurt again. We told her he was still in hospital, and showed her some earlier pictures of her visiting him in hospital and she accepted this fiction. So we repeated this story each time she asked. The Home she lived in was just a large bungalow with five resident inmates. My mother said she was staying with her cousin in the country and happily showed me the view of cattle in the fields outside. The cousin she spoke about had died many years ago. She still recognised me when I visited her and I tried to talk about things in the past so she wouldn’t be confused. I’m a terrible singer, but I sang the old songs and hymns with her, holding her hand. When I was going to visit her in the Home, I’d be thinking it is her, but not her. I would be sharing her world of past, present manufactured through Nachträglichkeit, and a future of a repeated present. It was hard to bear.
“Memory can create the illusion of a momentary return to a lost past; its operations also articulate the complex relationship between past, present and future in human consciousness.” (King, 2000) p.11.
Nachträglichkeit.
I mentioned this earlier, as something I had thought about, even though I didn’t know the term had been coined by Freud. I’m averse to bringing up Freud’s ideas, as I’ve always held him in very, very low esteem and that’s my scientific training to thank. He’s widely held to have invented a lot of his studies on the cases of Hysteria in Paris which made his reputation, so it goes against my instincts to quote him at all. When I hear people saying that awful meme, “fake it till you make it”, I think of him.
“Nachträglichkeit is a psychical process mentioned many times by Sigmund Freud, whereby an original experience is reconstituted, re-transcribed or rearranged in relation to ongoing circumstances – not only to replay the experience but to gather new meaning and endow it with a psychical effectiveness that has been lost by the repression of the experience.” (Radstone, 2000)
However, I feel the term is apposite as have others who developed it further than Freud.
I, myself, have developed a technique for writing scientific papers which is based on Nachträglichkeit, without me knowing it. A paper that I author is not written chronologically. I write part of the introduction, then do my calculations etc., write up my conclusions, then and only then, go back to the introduction (with the conclusions now known) and point the direction of the narrative arrow towards the conclusions. (Will I do that here? And in my practice?)
Primo Levi wrote, “It is true that a memory evoked too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become fixed in a stereotype, in a form tested by experience, crystallised, perfect, adorned, which installs itself in the place of raw memory and grows at its expense.” Implying that crystallised distortion of the original memory can occur through repetition. (Levi, 1988)
In his book “The Sense of an Ending”, Julian Barnes also has his main character musing over memories. Are our memories reliable?
“I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. I can’t be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left”. (Barnes, 2011) p.3.
His protagonist also has similar thoughts as Primo Levi’s, “How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves” (Barnes, 2011) p. 95. I wonder if this still holds in the days of social media, Instagram and Facebook, where a version of our lives can be played out and recorded daily and stored … forever?
Linda Grant in her book, “Remind Me Who I am, Again”, is even more scathing about what memory is and what it does to our identity.
“The self isn’t a little person inside the brain, it’s a work in progress, ‘a perpetually re-created, neurobiological state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it’s being remade’. Memory … is a fabrication, a new reconstruction of the original. And yet out of these unstable foundations we will still construct an identity. It’s a miracle. “ (Grant, 1999)
References
BARNES, J. 2011. The sense of an ending, London, Jonathan Cape.
GRANT, L. 1999. Remind me who I am, again, London, Granta Books.
LEVI, P. 1988. The drowned and the saved, New York, Summit Books.
Locke, John, (1975 [1690]), An Essay concerning human understanding. Ed. Peter M. Midditch. Oxford Clarendon Press.
RADSTONE, S. 2000. Memory and methodology, Oxford ; New York, Berg.
