The “Memory Play” and After: Narrative Paradigms

Abstract

Within the discipline of psychology, Frederic Bartlett’s 1932 Remembering inaugurated a “brief period of interest in ‘ordinary’ remembering and forgetting” (Richards 2002, 132), before memory was reabsorbed into the clinical study of psychopathology on the one hand and the laboratory study of educational application on the other. Bartlett’s emphasis on the constructive and social dimensions of remembering naturally pointed to a consideration of memory in the larger context of self-formation. For Bartlett, this context was evolutionary, in that he held organisms developed memory to account for the physically absent and thus to escape “over-determination by the last preceding member of a given series” (209). At the same time, he thought of self-formation as comprehensively cognitive, in that the composition of autobiographical memory responds to “appetite, instinct, interests and ideals” (210). Furthermore, Bartlett’s schemata or organized settings that constitute memory are themselves interconnected, and these interconnections are what we mean by temperament and character. Bartlett concluded that just as the ability to restructure and reprocess the organic mass of the past is virtually indistinguishable from consciousness, a concept of “self” is virtually reducible to the demands of an organism striving to organize perceptions via memory in accord with personal tendencies and social determinants.

Recordor et confiteor, recolo et narro.

St. Augustine

Memory is an action: essentially, it is the action of telling a story.

Pierre Janet, Les Médications Psychologiques