From the start, I intended Remembering to be a companion volume to my earlier book Imagining, and it is gratifying to witness new editions of both books now appearing at the same time. This fortuitous event will underline what the two texts have in common: above all, a shared phenomenological orientation, a commitment to a close and detailed description of the various forms and directions taken by each act. The close comparison of imagining and remembering is hardly new; the two acts have been linked ever since Aristotle’s inaugural discussion of human mental activity. Hobbes, Hume, and Kant expressly yoked them together as alternative but complementary fates of perception—its epistemic extension vis-à-vis past episodes (memory) or future happenings (imagination).
Although it is plausible to pair the two acts in this and other ways, by 1977—a year after the publication of Imagining and a decade before the appearance of Remembering—I had begun to discover basic differences between them that disallowed any claim (such as Hume’s) that they are both offshoots of perception, its direct or indirect “copy.” In an essay of that same year entitled “Imagining and Remembering” I maintained that despite their intimate collusion on many fronts (e.g., in the activity of the historian, in dreams, and in time-consciousness) they remain as distinct from each other as perception is from both. They differ from each other with regard to such fundamental things as the degree of familiarity they entail, their positing of content as existing or not, and their comparative corrigibility.1
This is not to deny that the two acts are also significantly similar. Not only is neither parasitic on perception, but each is at once free and autonomous. Both submit to what I call “intentional analysis,” according to which each exhibits certain comparable modes of operation (e.g., imagining or remembering that something is the case; imagining or remembering how to do something); and each features a “presentation” that has both a specific content and a spatiotemporal world-frame, along with a characteristic mode of givenness. Nevertheless, even at this bare beginning level, important differences emerge. The autonomy of imagining is “thin,” that of remembering “thick.” Where intentional analysis uncovers only three basic act-forms of imagining, it detects many more kinds of remembering: e.g., primary and secondary, remembering to-do something, remembering on-the-occasion-of some event, remembering-as (i.e., my friend as depressed), remembering-what (e.g., what Burlington is like), etcetera. Rather than the specific content of what we remember being simply surrounded by a mere “margin” of indeterminacy as in the case of imagining, an entire atmosphere permeates what we remember. In remembering, there is a tenuous but consistently felt “self-presence” of the rememberer that inheres in what is remembered—in contrast with imagining, in which the imaginer is often distant or absent from what is imagined.2 And when it comes to “eidetic analysis,” there is the striking fact that, whereas describing the six essential features of imagining took up the major part of an entire book, the corresponding traits of remembering occupies only a short chapter of ten pages.
These various differences point to a larger truth: the mansions of memory are many. So polymorphic is remembering that no single set of intentional structures or eidetic features can capture the whole phenomenon. Primary traits (e.g., encapsulment/expansion) are continually complicated by secondary traits (e.g., schematicalness) which refuse to be reduced to the simplicity of any central description. No wonder Remembering is almost twice as long as Imagining; no wonder, either, that it took so long to write! I thought I could polish off this successor volume in several years; instead, it took a decade to write. Remembering itself proved me wrong. I had to face up to the paradox that imagining, often taken to be the quintessence of the quirky and the quixotic, showed itself to be more regular in its enactment and structure than remembering, usually assumed to be the more reliable and sober of the two acts.3
As I settled into a more complex project than I had bargained for, I came upon a veritable proliferation of anomalies. “Anomalies” not construed as abnormalities—that is another matter, i.e., the pathology of memory, on which I shall touch below—but as departures from accepted norms. Whereas it had been assumed by memory theorists as astute as James and Husserl that remembering comes in just two basic forms (“primary” or “retentional” vs. “secondary” or “reproductive”), it became clear to me that there is an entire set of intermediate forms of remembering: intermediate between primary and secondary memory, as well as between mind and world. These included such familiar (yet rarely investigated) kinds of memory as recognizing X as Y, being reminded of B by A, and reminiscing. Despite important differences,4 these “mnemonic modes” take us from the realm of mind to the larger reaches of the surrounding world—from the involuted concerns of mentation to the way the world shows itself to be filled with recognitory clues, effective reminders, and things that inspire reminiscence. Instead of memory being confined to mind alone—as its own root memor, “mindful,” signifies—it enters here into a continuing close collusion with the lifeworld of its experience.
In Part Three of Remembering I took a further and still more heterodox step. By then, it had become evident to me that mind, rather than being part of the solution to an adequate phenomenology of memory, was endemic to the problem. At least this is so if mind is conceived as a receptacle of representations—as it has been since at least Descartes. In “Pursuing Memory Beyond Mind,” I argue that the privilege accorded to “recollection” (another name for secondary memory, i.e., long-term visualized recall of a previously experienced episode) is only another way of privileging mind itself as the source and container of representations. To pursue memory beyond mind is to seek exemplary instances of memory that are not tied to recollections and thus not to the mind as their unique vehicle.
I found three such exemplars of remembering that are not exclusively mentalistic, representational, or recollective: body memory, place memory, and commemoration. Here the pivotal phenomenon is place memory, that is, the fact that concrete places retain the past in a way that can be reanimated by our remembering them: a powerful but often neglected form of memory. Body memories are not just memories of the body but instances of remembering places, events, and people with and in the lived body. In commemoration, body and place memory conspire with co-participating others in ritualized scenes of co-remembering.
The discovery of this triad of non-representational and non-recollective rememberings meant the virtual explosion of the hegemony of older models of memory. This phase of my “memory-work” can be seen as deconstructive, since it questions the accepted paradigms of remembering as re-presencing in favor of a more polymorphic vision of the scope and limits of memory in which the return of the past in an explicitly visualized format—in “the mind’s eye”—is neither the aim nor the issue. The past can be fully and legitimately remembered without any such return in any such format. Both the realism and the representationalism of memory—brothers under the flesh—give way to a more nuanced model in which body and place, both ensconced in the life-world of the rememberer, assume an unaccustomed prominence.
This is only to say that memory must be pursued into its own otherness—into what is other than (and to) mind. Each of the exemplars at stake in Part Three others memory into something other than mind. Or let us say that in body, place, and commemoration, we witness the othering of mind into something other than itself. Remembering is in effect a progressive voyage into the othering of memory as traditionally conceived.
Beyond what I undertook in Part Three of this book, still other directions might have been pursued, had the book not already been so long. Several of these other directions have been taken by others in the meanwhile. Contemporary philosophical work on memory, for example, has sought the otherness of memory in its intimate alliance with writing or with flesh.5 By the same token, current psychological models of memory are enamored of the neurological basis of memory—with the Brain as the other of Mind.6
My own predilections are quite different. Were I to expand the present book into a second volume—as I once projected—I would investigate forgetting as the primary other of memory. As it stands, what is forgotten in Remembering is forgetting itself. In fact, I composed a long chapter on forgetting which I intended to include in this book, but I mislaid it; it resurfaced too late to include in the final manuscript. I tried to make up for this lapsus memoriae by publishing an article, “Forgetting Remembered,” in 1992.7 But all that this rambling piece establishes is the fact that forgetting itself is a vast terrain, with its own numerous types and subtypes. There is not just simple forgetting or forgetting-what (i.e., what we want to recall) but forgetting-how: forgetting not only how to do something but forgetting how we forgot it in the first place. Closely related to this is what I call “double oblivion,” i.e., forgetting that we ever knew something (in contrast with remembering that we once knew something but cannot now recall what this something is). The ever-proliferating array of amnesiac modes includes Freud’s notion that we can forget that of which we were never conscious to begin with, along with Nietzsche’s recommendation of “active forgetfulness.” Sometimes I think that I should have written a companion volume simply entitled Forgetting, and perhaps someday I shall.
From forgetting as an affair of the individual who can will it actively, two great ways branch outward: in one direction toward collective forgetting and in the other toward traumatic and repressed memory.
(1) Collective forgetting is the obliviferous obverse of collective remembering—not just its dark side, much less its mere lack, but constitutive of collective memory itself. About collective memory, too, I had written a discarded chapter for Remembering (as I did as well for such other topics as memory trace, narrational memory, and personal identity). A few other adventurous souls have set foot in this terra incognita: among them Halbwachs, Connerton, and Zerubavel.8 But no one to my knowledge has looked into just how “social amnesia” enters into genuinely interpersonal memory: how, in order to remember together, we must first forget together. To commemorate a war such as the Civil War or Vietnam is at the same time not to remember its many horrors, its unspeakable and even unthinkable mutilations and agonies. For an individual to recall the horrors is to undermine participation in the public event of commemoration.
But forgetting pervades even those cases in which we appear to have every reason to remember. Consider a funeral of a woman we know and love. Those who gather for this sad purpose are certainly honoring the deceased, and they may well recall for each other certain of her personal traits or various memorable events in which she took part. At the same time, however, the mourners are sanctioning each other to begin to forget the deceased—to “lay her to rest.” As if to underline this paradox, mourners in Gawa blacken themselves and live together for a prescribed period of time in a “house of forgetting.”9 The blackening seems symbolic of the encroaching oblivion; the shared life in the long house, though encouraging mutual reminiscing about the departed, acts as a preparation for the dispersal of the mourners into the separate lives in which remembering the deceased will be increasingly rare. Similarly, Freud remarks that after someone close to us has died we bring up memories of that person and hypercathect them—only to decathect them shortly after: the intensification of active remembrance is precisely what allows for the de-intensification of forgetfulness.10
In yet another kind of case, the collective remembrance of one thing entails the collective forgetting of something else. In video culture, for example, viewers are continually reminded of certain commonly held social constructs—e.g., highly conventional notions of family life—while being deprived, by their very viewing, of the active co-remembering (i.e., “communal-discursive reminiscing” in my terminology) which actual family life fostered before the advent of television and home video. Where Walter Benjamin would have considered this an instance of the loss of “aura,” I prefer to speak of “horizon-usurpation,” since here the horizon of direct reminiscing with others (e.g., on porches) is replaced by a monofocal and mostly nonverbal concentration on an all-consuming video event.
In all three of the cases just considered, collective remembering hides the very forgetting which it nevertheless requires. In still other instances, collective remembering and collective forgetting enter into manifest collaboration. I think of compulsive acting out by masses of people—blind acts of repetition which are equally cases of remembering (what to do and how to do it) and forgetting (why one is doing it). At Nuremberg, tens of thousands of people participated in ritualized support of the Third Reich: everyone who was part of these fiendish demonstrations knew what to do yet had no clear sense of just why they were doing it, beyond paying mindless tribute to Hitler and the Third Reich. Remembering what and how to do something at one level is forgetting why one is doing it at another, deeper level. In a case such as this, the remembering is the forgetting and vice versa. We can agree with Gadamer that “forgetting is not merely an absence and a lack but ... a condition of the life of the mind,”11 yet we must add that forgetting is also a condition of the life of an entire people and therefore of their collective remembering.
(2) Repressed traumatic memories are also subject to much the same intricate interplay of the remembered and the forgotten. Here, too, albeit at the level of the individual, we witness acting out that does not know itself as remembering or forgetting yet is somehow both at once. This is especially the case with repressed memories, which exhibit double oblivion in a conspicuous way: not only is what is repressed unavailable to consciousness (not to be confused with being merely inaccessible) but the very mechanism of repression is itself outside of conscious awareness (the what and the how are equally in oblivion). Moreover, the “return of the repressed” in symptoms and dreams is itself opaque in its significance; the why of their appearance is mysterious and hence calls for active interpretation. The highly encrypted character of what returns signifies that it is riddled with forgetting; the façade of the symptom or dream is oblivious of its own origins.
When traumas return as such and unbidden—when they are not subject to repressive distortions—they have a terrifying reality: e.g., as hallucinatory re-enactments of the trauma itself. This is what Freud noticed in the dreams of World War I veterans (and we see again in those of Vietnam veterans). Rather than being creatures of forgetfulness, such dreams are tantamount to suffering from too much remembering—too much for the dreaming subject to bear. By this painful route we reach the perplexing phenomenon of the repetition of trauma which led Freud to posit the death instinct. To tolerate, perhaps even to wish for, such painfully conscious reinstatements of traumatic situations would seem to indicate that the subject is willing to live “beyond the pleasure principle.” As was the case with the celebrated Russian mnemonist “S,” who could recall virtually everything he had ever experienced, so the victim of recurrent traumatic memories is in the anomalous position of wanting to forget—but being unable to do so.12
The victim of repressed memories, in contrast, is often in the converse position of wanting to remember—but again being unable to do so. This is the predicament of wanting to remember what really happened in early childhood or at some later point, so as to be liberated from the burden of the repressed past by means of what Freud called “abreaction,” i.e., an adequate emotional reaction to a repressed trauma—though still being unable to lift the curtain of repression to reveal the indentured memory. Destitute of any further direct evidence, yet convinced that one’s suffering is related to the withheld memories, such a person is tempted to confabulate what happened. Or to seek suggestions that engender such confabulation.
Taking this tempting path, one is quickly led to what has been termed the “false memory syndrome.” In the United States and Europe, this syndrome has focused on the supposed sexual abuse of children at the hands of depraved or “satanic” adults (typically parents but also siblings and teachers). This has generated an extensive literature that reached a crescendo in the mid-1990s, rejoining an emerging interest in the literary and philosophical dimensions of trauma.13 Were Remembering to be rewritten, it would include a chapter on these vexing matters; in lieu of that, let the following remarks suffice.
The primary issue raised by repressed trauma is that of unclaimed experience—to borrow a phrase from Cathy Caruth’s pioneering work.14 To be unclaimed is to be forgotten in that the trauma waits in limbo until reclaimed. To reclaim a trauma is to remember it: it is to take away its lethic veil and to make it part of one’s accessible memorial repertoire. It is to reown it—to acknowledge it as something that happened to oneself, not to someone else (and not to another self of one’s own, as in multiple personality disorder, which is often considered to be a way of coping with unbearable early trauma, i.e., by ascribing the trauma to a split-off self).15
Despite the undeniable therapeutic gain to be had in reclaiming a trauma that has been seething for many years beneath the memorial threshold, there is a correlative danger: namely, reclaiming that which never happened in the first place—in short, endorsing a false memory, a pseudo-memory about a purported past that is no past at all. This is not the situation to which both Merleau-Ponty and Levinas point—i.e., “a past which has never been a present”16: this is a past which is benign and even arguably constitutive of human temporal experience—nor is it the past at stake in Freud’s later notion of “constructions in analysis,” whereby the analyst makes reasonable conjectures about what happened in the patient’s unremembered past. Rather, the past here at issue is the confabulated past, that is, a fable (fabula) that seems to cohere with (con-) a person’s present life circumstance.
The confabulation of trauma may arise in several ways: by a person’s desperate need to fix blame for current miseries on some particular event, even if there is no evidence whatsoever that this event ever took place; by a cultural contagion that amounts to demonizing certain figures (in this case, parents, especially fathers); above all, by a therapist’s fixed view of the aetiology of symptoms, such that only a (sexual) trauma could have given rise to these symptoms, whether the trauma is remembered or not. By means of suggestion (enhanced by putting the patient in a hypnotic state), the therapist intimates that an early sexual trauma occurred: “perhaps your father approached you sexually at this time....” Given the painful and overwhelming character of the episode, it seems to be an obvious candidate for repression—indeed, for a double oblivion that would explain why there is no post-traumatic memory. Yet “repression” is here invoked in a highly dubious way: it is posited post hoc to account for not being able to remember a trauma when, in fact, there may be no trauma to remember. Remembering becomes an unfalsifiable notion that can be all too easily put into the service of a virtual witchhunt for traumatic origins.17
We encounter here a remarkable situation in which the abuse may not be sexual but an abuse of memory itself. This occurs in the blatant manufacture of memories to suit certain ends, above all to find a single cause and to fix blame on particular perpetrators. As Elizabeth Loftus asserts, in many instances of so-called recovered memories, “the [false] memories had actually created the trauma.”18 Instead of remembering traumas—for which there is a right time and place—there is only what James Hillman calls “remembering traumatically.”19
Both collective and traumatic memory extend the scope of forgetting beyond the usually recognized limits established by prevalent models (e.g., lapse, deterioration, distraction, interference, etc.). Each operates in individuals, as we see in the case of commemoration as well as in repressed memory; yet both take us beyond the individual in his or her autonomy and self-generated character—toward the intersubjectivity so manifest in original circumstances of incest (real or imagined) and in the psychotherapy that deals with their aftermath, as well as in public events of many sorts.
Most importantly, both kinds of forgetting take us beyond mind, which cannot encompass, much less explain, how collective oblivion occurs or why traumatic memories, actual or fabricated, have such devastating effects in their own distinctive forms of deep forgetfulness. These two types of forgetting take us even further beyond mind in its representational/recollective format than do body and place, those destabilizing epicenters of memory to which Remembering gestured so emphatically in its first edition of 1987. This was just before the renewed interest in collective memory arose (Halbwach’s On Collective Memory appeared in English in 1992; Zerubavel’s Social Memory was published in 1997), and also just before the intense debate surrounding the false memory syndrome reached its highest pitch in the period 1992-1995.
In Remembering I had hinted at the significance of traumatic memories and at the role of collective memory in commemoration.20 But the larger horizons of both were not explored, much less the ways in which each suggested the equiprimordiality of forgetting vis-à-vis remembering in general. If I point out these horizons now, it is only to indicate that much work remains to be done—in particular, a detailed description of forgetting in all of its avatars and applications. Only by offering such a description will I be able to claim to provide a truly comprehensive account of memory in its many modes, enactments, and extensions.
Edward S. Casey
SUNY at Stony Brook
January 2000
1. See “Imagining and Remembering,” reprinted from the Review of Metaphysics (December 1977) in Spirit and Soul: Essays in Philosophical Psychology (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1991), pp. 136-54.
2. On the results of intentional analysis, see Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 38-61; Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (below), pp. 48-85. Concerning the respective senses of freedom and of “thin” and “thick” autonomy, see Imagining, chs. 8-9, and Remembering, chs. 11-12.
3. Or was the difference not in myself—my younger self more bent on taming the phenomenon, whatever its extravagancies, in contrast with my middle-aged self more resigned and more open to the complexities of phenomena?
4. The mnemonic modes differ among themselves with regard to such fundamental parameters as medium of presentation (i.e., perception vs. indicative sign vs. word) and form of temporality (recognition is bound to the present; reminiscing focuses on the past; reminders range over both past and present as well as the future).
5. See David Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Charles Scott, The Memory of Time in the Light of Flesh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).
6. The classic work in the field, published in the same year as Remembering, is Larry R. Squire, Memory and Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). For a more current approach, see Stephen M. Kosslyn, Image and Brain (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).
7. “Forgetting Remembered,” Man and World (1992), 281-311. Bernhard Waldenfels discussed forgetting as the other of memory in a seminar given at SUNY, Stony Brook, October, 1999.
8. See Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective, 2nd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968); Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952); Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Eviatar Zerubavel, Social Memory: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
9. Nancy Munn, The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformations in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. pp. 166-80; see my discussion of Munn’s account in “Forgetting Remembered,” pp. 297-98.
10. See Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” tr. J. Strachey, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), XIV, esp. the statement that “each one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the [deceased person] is brought up and hypercathected, and [thereby] detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect to [this person]” (p. 245). See my comments on Freud’s model of mourning below, pp. 239-45.
11. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr. revised by J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall (New York: Seabury, 1991), p. 16.
12. I discuss “S” below in the Preface, p. xx, with reference to A. R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist, tr. L. Solotaroff (Chicago: Regnery, 1976). Concerning the predicament of being unable to forget a trauma, see the discussion of “constant ruminative preoccupation with the [traumatic] experience” in Lawrence Wright, Remembering Satan (New York: Knopf, 1994), pp. 165ff.
13. “False memory”—fausse reconnaissance in French—is equivalent to paramnesia, i.e., substituting a fabricated or would-be memory for a missing actual and accurate memory. On the false memory syndrome, see especially Wright, Remembering Satan; Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994); Mark Pendergrast, Victims of Memory: Incest Accusations and Shattered Lives (Hinesburg, Vt.: Upper Access, Inc., 1995).
14. See Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), and Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
15. On reowning, see Roy Schafer, A New Language for Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). Concerning multiple personality disorder (MPD), see Colin A. Ross, The Osiris Complex: Case-Studies in Multiple Personality Disorder (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). For an elegant philosophical analysis of MPD as well as the false memory syndrome, see Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
16. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. C. Smith et al. (New York: Humanities, 1982), p. 242. Levinas speaks similarly of “a past that was before the past”—and thus never part of any present—in his Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 170. Compare Freud’s claim: “something is ‘remembered’ which could never have been ‘forgotten’ because it was never at any time noticed—was never conscious” (“Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works [London: Hogarth, 1957], XII, 149).
17. As Lawrence Wright says: “Whatever the value of repression as a scientific concept or a therapeutic tool, unquestioning belief in it has become as dangerous as the belief in witches” (Remembering Satan, p. 200). Concerning the analogy between false memory syndrome and the witchcraft trials of the seventeenth century, see Loftus and Ketcham, The Myth of Repressed Memory, pp. 250-63 (with special reference to Arthur Millers “The Crucible”) and Pendergrast, Victims of Memory, ch. 12.
18. Loftus and Ketchum, The Myth of Repressed Memory, p. 18. Loftus has shown how easy it is to plant a memory in an innocent person’s mind and for that person to come to believe that it designates a real event: see her testimony about a false memory of her own that arose from a mere remark of a family member: Loftus and Ketcham, The Myth of Repressed Memory, pp. 39-40.
19. Cited by Loftus at ibid., p. 268. The full statement is: “I’m not saying that children aren’t molested or abused. They are molested, and they are abused, and in many cases it’s absolutely devastating. But therapy makes it even more devastating by the way it thinks about it. It isn’t just the trauma that does the damage, it’s remembering traumatically.” (Cited, with Hillman’s italics, from We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse [New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992], from pp. 187-99.)
20. See Remembering, pp. 154-57 (on traumatic memories) and chapter ten, esp. pp. 231-39, 247-55 (on the collective or “communal” aspect of commemoration).