Remembering, Second Edition: A Phenomenological Study

By Edward S. Casey

Remembering
A Phenomenological Study
Second Edition
Edward S. Casey

A pioneering investigation of the multiple ways of remembering and the difference that memory makes in our daily lives.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

"An excellent book that provides an in-depth phenomenological and philosophical study of memory." —Choice

". . . a stunning revelation of the pervasiveness of memory in our lives." —Contemporary Psychology

"[Remembering] presents a study of remembering that is fondly attentive to its rich diversity, its intricacy of structure and detail, and its wide-ranging efficacy in our everyday, life-world experience. . . . genuinely pioneering, it ranges far beyond what established traditions in philosophy and psychology have generally taken the functions and especially the limits of memory to be." —The Humanistic Psychologist

Edward S. Casey provides a thorough description of the varieties of human memory, including recognizing and reminding, reminiscing and commemorating, body memory and place memory. The preface to the new edition extends the scope of the original text to include issues of collective memory, forgetting, and traumatic memory, and aligns this book with Casey's newest work on place and space. This ambitious study demonstrates that nothing in our lives is unaffected by remembering.

Studies in Continental Thought—John Sallis, general editor

Contents
Preface to the Second Edition
Introduction Remembering Forgotten: The Amnesia of Anamnesis
Part One: Keeping Memory in Mind
First Forays
Eidetic Features
Remembering as Intentional: Act Phase
Remembering as Intentional: Object Phase
Part Two: Mnemonic Modes
Prologue
Reminding
Reminiscing
Recognizing
Coda
Part Three: Pursuing Memory beyond Mind
Prologue
Body Memory
Place Memory
Commemoration
Coda
Part Four: Remembering Re-membered
The Thick Autonomy of Memory
Freedom in Remembering

• Language: English
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2009
• ISBN: 9780253114310

Book preview

Remembering

Studies in Continental Thought

GENERAL EDITOR

John Sallis

CONSULTING EDITORS

REMEMBERING

A Phenomenological Study

Second Edition

EDWARD S. CASEY

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS

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Indiana University Press

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© 1987 and 2000 by Edward S. Casey

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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

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Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Casey, Edward S., date

Remembering : a phenomenological study / Edward S. Casey.—2nd ed.

p. cm. — (Studies in Continental thought)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-253-33789-5 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-253-21412-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Memory (Philosophy) 2. Phenomenology.

I. Title.   II. Series.

BD181.7 .C33 2000

128'.3—dc21

00-057231

1  2  3  4  5  05  04  03  02  01  00

To The Memory of

My Parents

Catherine J. Casey Marlin S. Casey

And in Remembrance of

the Vanished World of

My Grandparents

Daisy Hoffman Johntz John Edward Johntz

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION Remembering Forgotten: The Amnesia of Anamnesis

Part One: Keeping Memory in Mind

     I  First Forays

    II  Eidetic Features

   III  Remembering as Intentional: Act Phase

   IV  Remembering as Intentional: Object Phase

Part Two: Mnemonic Modes

PROLOGUE

     V  Reminding

    VI  Reminiscing

   VII  Recognizing

CODA

Part Three: Pursuing Memory beyond Mind

PROLOGUE

  VIII  Body Memory

      IX  Place Memory

       X  Commemoration

CODA

Part Four: Remembering Re-membered

    XI  The Thick Autonomy of Memory

   XII  Freedom in Remembering

NOTES

INDEX

Rethinking Remembering

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

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.

I

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.

II

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 present¹⁶: 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

Notes

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).

PREFACE

through spiral upon spiral of the shell of memory that yet connects us. . . .

—H.D., The Flowering of the Rod

The fact is that we have almost no systematic knowledge about memory as it occurs in the course of ordinary life.

—Ulrich Neisser, Cognition and Reality

In the case of memory, we are always already in the thick of things. For this reason there can properly be no preface to remembering: no pre-facing the topic in a statement that would precede it and capture its essence or structure in advance. Memory itself is already in the advance position. Not only because remembering is at all times presupposed, but also because it is always at work: it is continually going on, often on several levels and in several ways at once. Although there are many moments of misremembering and of not successfully recollecting, there are few moments in which we are not steeped in memory; and this immersion includes each step we take, each thought we think, each word we utter. Indeed, every fiber of our bodies, every cell of our brains, holds memories—as does everything physical outside bodies and brains, even those inanimate objects that bear the marks of their past histories upon them in mute profusion. What is memory-laden exceeds the scope of the human: memory takes us into the environing world as well as into our individual lives.

To acknowledge such a massive pre-presence of memory is to acknowledge how irreducibly important remembering is. If we need to be convinced of how much memory matters to us, we have only to ponder the fate of someone deprived of its effective use. Consider, for instance, the case of the unfortunate M.K., a high school teacher who at age forty-three was suddenly struck by an acute episode of encephalitis. Within hours, he lost access to almost all memories formed during the previous five years. Worse still, he had virtually no memory of anything that happened to him afterwards: since the onset of the illness, he has learned a few names over the years, a few major events, and can get around the hospital.¹ This laconic summary, tragic in its very brevity, conveys the empty essence of a life rendered suddenly memoryless by a microscopic viral agent. Such a life is without aim or direction; it spins in the void of the forgotten, a void in which one cannot even be certain of one’s personal identity. Not only does it show that what most of us take for granted can be abolished with an incomprehensible rapidity; it also poses the problem of how anything that permeates our lives so deeply can be lost so irrevocably.

How much memory matters can also be seen in the quite different case of S., a Russian mnemonist with an astonishing capacity to recall. When asked, as one of myriad tests, to repeat several stanzas of The Divine Comedy in Italian (a language he did not know) some fifteen years after having the stanzas read to him just once, he was able to recite them word for word and with perfect intonation. As A. R. Luria has observed, "the capacity of his memory had no distinct limits."² Envious as we might be of such a capacity, it is noteworthy that S. suffered greatly from it; so overburdened by it was he that he had to devise techniques for forgetting what he would otherwise irrepressibly remember, no matter how trivial it was: This is too much, he lamented, each word calls up images; they collide with one another, and the result is chaos.³ Where forgetting was M.K.’s curse, it was S.’s salvation. But in the end, it is not clear that S., with his gift, was any less oppressed than was M.K. in his afflicted state.

These two figures are limiting cases of what the rest of us, as more or less normal rememberers, experience. On the one hand, each of us has undergone moments or even entire periods of acute amnesia. Whether such amnesia is contingent and occasion-bound (e.g., failing to recall the name of a friend or, more drastically, the circumstances immediately preceding a concussion) or systematic and symptomatic (as in forgetting dreams or incidents from early childhood), it is embarrassing and discomfiting and sometimes even disabling. On the other hand, it is a fact that eight percent of elementary school children possess practically perfect eidetic recall.⁴ Moreover, many adults can recover deeply repressed memories in vivid detail even though they have never been recollected before; and, generally, our powers of hypermnesia (i.e., ultra-clear memory) are much more extensive than we usually suspect.⁵ Just as we have no difficulty in grasping the devastating consequences of M.K.’s memory loss, so we connect immediately with S.’s prodigious feats of memory through certain of our own inherent, if distinctly more modest, capacities.

Nevertheless, even if we do not find M.K. or S. utterly alien, most of the remembering that most of us do falls between the poles of hypomnesia and hypermnesia. Thus the question becomes: what can we say with confidence about our own remembering as it occurs spontaneously and on a daily basis? Short of total recall and yet beyond amnesic vacuity, how does human memory present itself? What basic forms does it assume? With what content is it concerned? How much is it a function of the human mind, how much of the human body? In short, what do we do when we remember?

Remembering: A Phenomenological Study attempts to answer such questions as these by taking a resolutely descriptive look at memory as it arises in diverse commonplace settings. In these settings we rarely attend to what we are doing when we remember; we just let it happen (or fail to happen). How can we begin to notice what we so much take for granted—except precisely when we hear of extraordinary cases such as those of M.K. and S.? This book undertakes to help us notice what has gone unnoticed or been noticed only marginally. In this respect the book is a work in phenomenology, an enterprise devoted to discerning and thematizing that which is indistinct or overlooked in everyday experience.

Remembering represents a sequel to my earlier study of imagination.⁶ But there is a critical difference between the two inquiries, which are otherwise closely affiliated. This difference follows directly from the multifarious incursions of memory into the life-world of the rememberer. These inroads are such as to resist complete capture in the structure of intentionality, which served as a guiding thread in Imagining. In remembering, there is an unresolvable restance⁷—resistance as well as remainder—which calls for a different approach. Intentional analysis remains valid for much of ordinary recollection (e.g., in visualized scenes), and I devote chapters 3 and 4 to the exploration of remembering insofar as it can be construed on the model of the mind’s intentionality. But once we realize how forcefully many phenomena of memory take us out of mind conceived as a container of ideas and representations, we can no longer rest content with intentionality as a leitmotif.⁸ That is why in Part Two I consider various mnemonic modes—i.e., recognizing, reminiscing, and reminding—each of which can be seen as contesting the self-enclosing character of strictly intentionalist paradigms. In Part Three I depart still further from the narrow basis established in Part One; I do so by describing body memory, place memory, and commemoration. In spite of their central position in human experience, these latter have been curiously neglected in previous accounts of memory. Their description leads me to discuss memory’s thick autonomy in Part Four: an autonomy which is to be contrasted with the equally characteristic thin autonomy of imagination.

A descriptive account of remembering will help us to recognize that we remember in multiple ways: that the past need not come packaged in the prescribed format of representational recollections. To fail to remember in this format is not tantamount to failing to remember altogether. When one memorial channel to the past becomes closed off, others often open up—indeed, are often already on hand and fully operative. I may not retain a lucid mental image of an acrimonious quarrel with a certain friend—I may have successfully repressed it—and yet the same scene may be lingering in an inarticulate but nonetheless powerful body memory. The point is not that there is a meaningful alternative in every case: the sad circumstance of M.K. warns us of dire limits. But plural modes of access to the remembered past are far more plentiful than philosophers and psychologists have managed to ascertain.⁹

Remembering returns us to the very world lost sight of in the language of representations and of neural traces. Indeed, remembering reminds us that we have never left the life-world in the first place, that we are always within it, and that memory is itself the main life-line to it. For memory takes us into things—into the Sachen selbst which Husserl proclaimed to be the proper objects of phenomenological investigation. In remembering, we come back to the things that matter.

But memory is not just something that sustains a status quo ante within human experience. It also makes a critical difference to this experience. The situation is such that remembering transforms one kind of experience into another: in being remembered, an experience becomes a different kind of experience. It becomes a memory, with all that this entails, not merely of the consistent, the enduring, the reliable, but also of the fragile, the errant, the confabulated. Each memory is unique; none is simple repetition or revival. The way that the past is relived in memory assures that it will be transfigured in subtle and significant ways.

If this is indeed the case—if memory matters in our experience by making a difference in the form our experience itself takes—then a detailed description of remembering is called for. Such a description will not only aid us in distinguishing remembering from kindred phenomena of imagining and perceiving, feeling and thinking; it will also lead us to realize that it was always misguided to propose that remembering could be regarded as a mere offshoot of mind or brain, fated to repeat what has already happened elsewhere. Remembering is itself essential to what is happening, part of every action, here as well as elsewhere: remembrance is always now.¹⁰ It is also, thanks to its transformative force in the here and now, then and there. Not only is nothing human alien to memory; nothing in the world, including the world itself, is not memorial in nature or in status. And if this is so, it follows that whatever we know exists in proportion to the memories we possess.¹¹ Thus far reaches remembering: it stretches as far as we can know.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To acknowledge adequately the help of so many colleagues, friends, and family members during the decade in which this book has come to birth would itself be a considerable feat of memory. Let me single out only those who offered the most important intellectual and personal resources during this protracted period of time—resources without which this book could not have been written.

First of all, I would like to thank my colleagues and students at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. They have provided a most congenial and exciting atmosphere in which to teach and write. A primary inspiration at Stony Brook has been Marcia K. Johnson, now in the Psychology Department at Princeton University. Together, we taught a graduate course on human memory in which I worked out a number of my fledgling ideas against the backdrop of current cognitive psychology; informally, we discussed many of the themes that appear in this book. In the Philosophy Department at Stony Brook I am especially grateful to Mary C. Rawlinson for her searching remarks on Proust and the subject of involuntary memory. Contributing in diverse ways have been Patrick Heelan, Donn Welton, Eva Kittay, Hugh Silverman, Antonio de Nicolas, and Don Ihde. In Religious Studies I owe much to Peter Manchester’s magisterial understanding of ancient Greek philosophy and its late Hellenistic heritage. His colleagues Robert Neville and Thomas J. J. Altizer have been guiding presences. With Janet Gyatso I have discussed to my great profit the semiological aspects of memory, especially the nature of reminders; she also commented valuably on several parts of the manuscript.

Every author should be so fortunate as to have a reader as mercilessly critical, and yet as imaginatively constructive, as J. Melvin Woody of Connecticut College. He saw through most of my rhetorical ruses and inept formulations and led me to rewrite virtually the whole book during a semester’s sabbatical leave. If the book as it stands has finally begun to approach coherence, it is very much thanks to my friend’s concerted scrutinies.

I am also indebted to Calvin Schrag for his meticulous reading of the entire manuscript at an early stage. His suggestions for reductions in a manuscript that was twice the present length have proven very useful. I also profited immensely from the close readings of Deborah Chaffin; her ideas for revisions have been taken into account in many places. Laura Jerabek was helpful in discussing several chapters of the evolving book. Indispensable to the completion of this project has been Catherine Keller. Not only has she commented on most of the text, she encouraged my recourse to Whitehead at a crucial juncture. Her extensive knowledge of mythology and her subtle sense of style have been gratefully received gifts during the time in which this book assumed its final shape.

Of the numerous people who read determinate parts of the manuscript at various points I wish to mention here Drew Leder for his pertinent remarks on the neurophysiological aspects of memory and for his critical perusal of the chapter on body memory. Glen Mazis also contributed insightfully to my understanding of body memory and its ramifications. Charles Scott set me straight on basic features of place memory in a memorable talk in Perugia, Italy. The role of landscape in place memory was illuminated by David Strong in several discussions. I am especially indebted to Véronique Fóti for her expert guidance in grasping Descartes’s conception of memory as well as for talks in which we profitably explored assorted topics in the realm of remembering. Her rigorous standards of scholarship as well as her considerable critical acumen have been of inestimable value in the last nine years.

Friends in the field of psychology—which has devoted more attention to memory than has philosophy in this century—have been inspiring figures in the course of this book’s gestation. James Hillman and I have debated, in public and in private, the respective features and virtues of imagination and memory. He also generously provided a place of retreat several summers ago in Botorp, Sweden, where I was able to think out the second half of the book. For many years Stanley Leavy and I have engaged in virorous discussions on psychoanalysis and related matters. His seminal book, The Psychoanalytic Dialogue, has been of central significance in my efforts to bring psychoanalysis to bear on my own project. JoAnne Wallen contributed significant insights from the practice of psychotherapy and from her own remarkable psychological sagacity. I also learned much from Dan Reisberg’s scintillating lectures at the New School for Social Research on the status of current research on memory in cognitive psychology. Henry Tylbor provoked me to rethink aspects of remembering that I had taken for granted.

For their ongoing support in differing contexts I would like to express my deeply felt gratitude to William Earle, a continuing mentor and friend; Hans W. Loewald, steadfast and untiring in his invaluable assistance; Jan Larson, a most discerning Diotima for more than thirty years of friendship; and especially Brenda Casey, who created an ambiance in which writing could be pursued even into the latest hours. Eric and Erin Casey were movingly memorable presences in that same ambiance. My sister, Constance J. Casey, kept me in vivid touch with important childhood memories. Reed Hoffman, my esteemed cousin of Enterprise, Kansas, apprised me of details concerning the vanished world cited in the dedication to this book.

Virginia Massaro typed several versions of chapters with grace and skill. Others who helped in the typing of the manuscript include Sally Moran, Mary Bruno, and above all Jean Edmunds in the final stages. I received excellent editorial assistance from Lila Freedman, who combined sensitivity concerning style with intelligent critique of content. Librarians at the Guildford Public Library aided me in numerous ways.

I wish finally to thank the American Council of Learned Societies for a fellowship that allowed me to write the first chapters of this book in the fall of 1977 and to the State University of New York at Stony Brook for granting me a year’s leave of absence in 1984-85, during which time the book was completed.

Remembering

INTRODUCTION

REMEMBERING FORGOTTEN

THE AMNESIA OF ANAMNESIS

I come into the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are treasures of countless images of things of every manner.

—St. Augustine, Confessions

I convince myself that nothing has ever existed of all that my deceitful memory recalls to me.

—Descartes, Meditations

We moderns have no memories at all.

—Frances Yates, The Art of Memory

I

Nietzsche’s essay On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, first published in 1874, opens with the following fable:

Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, [are] fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure.... A human being may well ask [such] an animal: Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me? The animal would like to answer, and say: The reason is that I always forget what I was going to say—but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent: so that the human being was left wondering.¹

Not wholly unlike the bovine beings here described by Nietzsche, we have not only forgotten what it is to remember—and what remembering is—but we have forgotten our own forgetting. So deep is our oblivion of memory that we are not even aware of how alienated we are from its treasures and how distant we have become from its deliverances. Memory, itself preoccupied with the past, is practically passé—a topic of past concern. Despite its manifold importance in our lives, it is only in unusual circumstances that remembering remains an item of central concern on contemporary agendas. These circumstances themselves tend to be distinctly self-contained and removed from ordinary life, whether they are found in psychoanalytic sessions, Eastern visualization techniques, or experiments in cognitive psychology. Philosophers have come to despair over finding a constructive approach to memory; they have discredited and discarded a number of existing theories, especially those that make representation of the past the basic function of remembering; yet they have rarely offered a positive account of memory to take the place of rejected theories.

The fact is that we have forgotten what memory is and can mean; and we make matters worse by repressing the fact of our own oblivion. No wonder Yates can claim that we moderns have no memories at all. Where once Mnemosyne was a venerated Goddess, we have turned over responsibility for remembering to the cult of the computers, which serve as our modern mnemonic idols. The force of the remembered word in oral traditions—as exemplified in feats of bardic recounting that survive only in the most isolated circumstances²—has given way to the inarticulate hum of the disk drive. Human memory has become self-externalized: projected outside the rememberer himself or herself and into non-human machines. These machines, however, cannot remember; what they can do is to record, store, and retrieve information—which is only part of what human beings do when they enter into a memorious state. The memory of things is no longer in ourselves, in our own discerning and interpreting, but in the calculative wizardry of computers. If computers are acclaimed as creations of our own devising, they remain—whatever their invaluable utility—most unsuitable citadels of memory, whose fields and spacious palaces (in St. Augustine’s phrase) they cannot begin to contain or to replicate. Although certain non-human things can indeed bear memories—as we shall see toward the close of this book—computers cannot. Computers can only collect and order the reduced residues, the artfully formatted traces, of what in the end must be reclaimed by human beings in order to count as human memories. In this respect, our memories are up to us. But for the most part and ever increasingly, we have come to disclaim responsibility for them.

In the same essay as that cited above, Nietzsche suggests one of the motives for our amnesia concerning memory: Even a happy life is possible without remembrance, as the beast shows; but life in any true sense is absolutely impossible without forgetfulness.³ Nietzsche himself advocates the concerted practice of active forgetfulness—all the more imperative if his doctrine of eternal recurrence is ultimately true. For if everything recurs an endless number of times, we would be well advised to avoid remembering anything that has happened even (apparently) only once! To recall what has happened an infinite number of times—including our own acts of recollecting—would be to assume a crushing burden. As Milan Kundera has put the matter:

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht).

If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.⁴

Splendid lightness is fostered by forgetting, an active forgetting of that which becomes intolerably heavy when remembered. Kundera continues:

But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it,