Forgetting is as much maligned today really, as the notion of regression seems to me to be, in our culture. I tend to jolt a little, when people explain a forgotten moment as 'old age' - mostly because I consider in some ways, my ability to remember has gotten better as I've gotten older (says she at the grand age of 35). What's happened perhaps is that I've garnered more strategies for remembering things over time. Also, for me now, the world is less a place that I react to, and more a place that I'm graced to observe, and so from that perspective there may be a few more cues available for recall than there would have been for me, in my gung-ho passionately involved but mostly misdirected twenties.
Either way, as the line that Schlesinger opens this paper with says 'though widely used, forgetting is a poorly understood process'. This post attempts to summarise and present his main arguments (or paradoxes) that he sees as being inherent in the process of forgetting.
He starts with two ideas:
1. Firstly, that the act of repression (as I see it, the act of secondary repression) is a form of memory as much as it is a forgetting, acting like a 'hell room' in a sacred library by keeping forbidden material out of general reach, with no card catalog record.
2. Forgetting can be seen as the normal organisational process occuring withing memory, with new schemata being consistently re-drawn in line with the experience of the self. Content may simply be rearranged into larger patterns of meaning, generalised, subordinated or condensed as a process of efficient memory functioning.
Freud wrote 'A Project for Scientific Psychology' in 1895. The genius of this man becomes apparent when you consider that he was theorising about the possibility that memory is represented at the synaptic level as 'a permanent alteration following an event' well before the neuroscientific data and measurement capability that we have available to us today. Through this paper, according to Schlesinger we find breadcrumbs that help us piece together a theory of forgetting, per Freud.
It's important to note that forgetting is a selective process. Freud in 1904 offered that forgetting takes place through condensation, the blending together of ideas, thus becoming the basis for formation of concepts, In repression, Freud proposed that confusion in condensation was possible because distortion was a likely outcome of memories under the force of repression.
While we may think of forgetting as a function of time for Freud this was not a truth - rather, patterns of 'distorting trends' prevented us from being able to access the original memory, through active repression.
Freud had some clear positions on forgetting, per Schlesinger:
1. He held that nothing registered in memory is every absolutely lost. The evidence for multiple registrations of every impression, existing in subsequent forms in the course of development, combines to render repressed material somewhat immune to forgetting.
2. Freud directly rejected a disuse theory of forgetting (this has been picked up by Kihlstrom).
3. Freud highlighted the uniqueness in individual's patterns of remembering - styles of memory organisation are highly variable.
4. Freud implicated a mechanism, condensation, as responsible for forgetting. This gets difficult because Freud also invokes condensation processes in repression.
With respect to repression, it can be noted per Freud per Schlesinger, that repression's goal is to avoid pain through memory - the pleasure principle is served in opposing the possibility of a better appreciation of reality, mentally.
The reality principle is served through the constant reorganising of verbal memory trace, with consistent renewal in working memory. Forgetting, as a notion, here would simply mean the adaptation of new patterns of memory organisation over-riding the old ones, thus emphasizing certain memories, linking some and obliterating others. Loss of centrality in the memory schema renders less clarity to a memory, and so it becomes fused with other elements to be only available in conceptual form.
Experimentally there have been many experiments performed with nonsense stimuli, to reveal that us humans are very good at recalling absolute truffles of meaning. Information that has been 'forgotten' is pretty easily restored, for us people, with a few prompts (would that some of my old hard drives displayed such similar malleability and influence.
Notably, for ye of occult and ritual practice, who have wandered this far through my comments and summarising, Schlesinger notes 'the by far preferred style of memorising meaningful material is to organise it in a way that relies less on specific connections between isolated elements than upon overall patterns.' These are called schemata - organising principles with personal reference. Remembering is identified as 'an imaginative reconstruction..built out of the relation of our attitude toward the whole active mass of organised past reactions or experience'. In most areas of human concern, literal recall of learned material is of minimal importance.
The work of psychoanalysis is to remember so that one can properly forget. The psychic economy seems to me to be an underlying schemata that characterises much of Freud's work (with the Marxist focus of his cultural time and place, this is perhaps not a surprising find, given the probable dominant social discourse). Secondary repression seems usually instigated for a reason - trauma, superego conflict, a defense mechanism that may actually serve healthy ego functioning. In maturation, repression shifts from a disruption in memory functioning to a subtle interplay of adaptive and defensive purposes, which may obfuscate an inarticulateness under broader fluency and eloquence. In other words, repression may be many things, but this paper goes to great lengths to show, repression does not equal forgetting.
Ref:
Schlesinger, H.J. (1970). The Place of Forgetting in Memory Functioning. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 18, 358 - 371.
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