Memory, Trauma, and History

Essays on Living with the Past

Michael Roth

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231521611
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicoanálisis

In these essays, Michael S. Roth uses psychoanalysis to build a richer understanding of history, and then takes a more expansive conception of history to decode the cultural construction of memory. He first examines the development in nineteenth-century France of medical criteria for diagnosing memory disorders, which signal fundamental changes in the understanding of present and past. He next explores links between historical consciousness and issues relating to the psyche, including trauma and repression and hypnosis and therapy. Roth turns to the work of postmodern theorists in connection with the philosophy of history and then examines photography's capacity to capture traces of the past. He considers how we strive to be faithful to the past even when we don't care about getting it right or using it productively. Roth concludes with essays defending pragmatic and reflexive liberal education. Drawing on his experiences as a teacher and academic leader, he speaks of living with the past without being dominated by it.

PART 1

NINETEENTH-CENTURY MALADIES OF MEMORY

1. Remembering Forgetting

Maladies de la Mémoire in Nineteenth-Century France

Thus even a happy life is possible without remembrance, as the beast shows: but life in any true sense is absolutely impossible without forgetfulness.

NIETZSCHE

A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. An unfailing memory is not a very powerful incentive to the study of the phenomenon of memory.

PROUST

The attempt to understand how a culture lives with or against its past often leads to a consideration of rituals, ceremonies, monuments, and written history. When we want to know about the ways people recollect the past and represent it, we want to know about individual as well as social memory. Individual memory is notoriously difficult to comprehend, and we are currently witnessing resurgences of interest both in social memory and in the ways in which the brain stores and organizes memories. The works of Oliver Sacks and Israel Rosenfield have brought neurobiology to a popular audience, and treatments of the latest trends in brain research on memory by the press and by television have called attention to the mechanisms of memory.¹ Such public concerns with memory and with the investigation of it can be considered screens on which a culture projects its anxieties about repetition, change, representation, authenticity, and identity. By examining cultural imaginations of remembering and forgetting we can learn much about cultural investments in questions about continuity and change.

The end of the nineteenth century in France was also a period in which there was great interest in the mechanisms of memory, especially in their malfunctions. The expressions of this interest can be considered to be what Pierre Nora and his collaborators have called a “lieu de mémoire.” Maladies of memory attracted the curiosity of doctors, philosophers, and the popular press because they seemed to be phenomena in which one could discover the secrets of conservation and reproduction. Moreover, memory disturbances became a specific kind of problem—a problem not only of recall but of disease, the representations of which contained important lessons about the brain, the self, responsibility, and normality. In the age of the ideology of progress and of the reality of the accelerating disappearance of traditional society, conservation and reproduction were no longer to be the province only of popular memory. But the medicalization of memory included a certain amnesia. In other words, the new discourse about maladies of memory depended in part on a blindness to the status of this discourse itself. Sander Gilman has noted how in the depiction of disease, “The fear we have of our own collapse does not remain internalized. Rather, we project this fear onto the world in order to localize it, and, indeed, to domesticate it.”² Professional as well as popular curiosity generated many tales about people who suffered from their memories or from the lack of them, as it also fed the need to explain in a rational way, or organize into acceptable categories, what seemed to be bizarre phenomena. What are we to make of these stories and explanations, which often seem to merge into a single, paradoxical series of narratives? At the very least, we should begin to notice how the representation of maladies of memory in the medical narratives of case studies project a concern with, and perhaps anxiety about, what the normal or healthy relation of past and present might be.

However the interest in memory disorders may be symptomatic of the ways contemporaries viewed the use and abuse of the past, I think we can see that in late-nineteenth-century France the discourse about conserving and reproducing the past was also a discourse about what it meant to be normal in the present. Not surprisingly, when moderns want to know about the normal relation to the past, they accumulate examples of the abnormal. Here I shall simply indicate how three maladies de la mémoire—amnesia, hypermnesia, and periodic amnesia—were crucial for those trying to define how much of the past we need to be able to recapture, and when too much of the past captures us. I shall sketch briefly some of the immediate contexts for the investigation of amnesia, hypermnesia, and periodic amnesia and discuss three scientific approaches to the disorders. We shall see how Théodul Ribot, professor at the Collège de France and a major figure in late-nineteenth-century French psychology and philosophy, constituted amnesia as a scientific and clinical problem, and how Albert Guillon, a clinician in Bordeaux during the same period, used the study of hypermnesia to determine when too much memory is unhealthy. Finally, we shall briefly discuss Eugène Azam’s case of periodic amnesia, or multiple personality, Félida X.

A great admirer of Hippolyte Taine and Herbert Spencer, Ribot was enormously influential. The founder of the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, he aimed to make both psychology and philosophy more scientific. Guillon, on the other hand, never emerged from the shadow of his maître Emmanuel Régis, but his thesis on hypermnesia reflects some of the important trends in nineteenth-century French psychiatry. Azam was also a clinician in Bordeaux, but he became well known throughout French scientific circles because of his work on the case of Félida. All three agreed with Nietzsche’s idea that forgetfulness is necessary for life “in any true sense,” but they went on to specify how much forgetting made for a normal life, and when too much forgetting was a sign of disease. Their work on maladies of memory is framed by an effort to differentiate the disorders they write about from the normal workings of memory and from the order of their own observations. These figures were part of a large constellation of professionals who at the end of the nineteenth century helped create the representation of the healthy human individual as the embodiment of a particular connection between past and present. The scientistic discourse that we shall examine in this essay helped foster a forgetting that this connection was a cultural construction and not a natural discovery. The study of maladies de la mémoire should contribute to our comprehension of how our relations with our pasts have been conditioned by expectations about how much conservation and reproduction of the past is good for us.

NOT ENOUGH: LOCALIZING AND ORDERING AMNESIA

Amnesia was a disease of the nineteenth century. It was discussed at the end of the eighteenth century by Francisco Boissier de Sauvages in his classification of medical disorders, but it was the next century that first paid attention to it and gave it importance as a phenomenon that shed light on the normal functioning of memory.³ And it was in the second half of that century that the study of amnesia became a principal vehicle for understanding the dynamics of memory. In the 1819 Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, the article on “mémoire: maladies de la” is twenty-eight pages long, while the article on “amnésie” has only several lines. In the 1865 Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales there is a dense, seventeen-page entry on “amnésie,” with only a few lines devoted to the entry “mémoire.”⁴ Defined as the total or partial loss of memory, amnesia is not to be confused with forgetting specific experiences of the past. Instead, amnesia is conceived as a disturbance in the faculty of memory—a disturbance that either prevents the mental storage of the past or that inhibits our conscious access to the past as past which is encoded in the brain.

There are several reasons for the abundance of nineteenth-century writing about amnesia.⁵ The first is that this was the great period of professionalization of French psychiatry, and that there was suddenly much writing about many kinds of psychiatric disturbances. As Jan Goldstein has shown, classification of disorders was one of the principal vehicles for the establishment of psychiatry as a profession.⁶ We can add that amnesia was a particularly important phenomenon in this regard because it was, in Ribot’s phrase, both a “biological and a psychological fact.” Thus we find that Ribot’s Revue philosophique not only was the organ for his own writings on memory dysfunctions but also welcomed reports from psychiatrists, neurologists, and philosophers interested in how memory is affected by such diverse phenomena as sleep, trauma, dreams, disease, and hypnotism. In other words, understanding amnesia was the philosopher’s and the clinician’s route to understanding memory in a way that would show not only how the brain works but also how we know who we are. And the claims of both to have scientific knowledge of the former were used to legitimate their authority to speak on the latter.

Earlier, phrenology had an important influence on the ways in which psychology and biology were linked via the brain and skull. Phrenology was imported to Paris from Vienna in the first decade of the nineteenth century, and its founder, Franz Josef Gall, played a major role in relating specific parts of the brain to specific human characteristics. Although the phrenologist’s claim that the characteristics of the brain could be determined by examining the skull was ultimately rejected, the idea that the brain was the organ of the mind remained a crucial component of physiological psychiatry until the end of the century.⁷

A decisive step in relating memory and the brain was taken in 1861 by Paul Broca, who claimed that a lesion in the left side of the brain was the cause of the loss of a specific linguistic function. The moral of Broca’s case study was taken to be the following: memory images are stored in discrete sections of the brain. Trauma to a part of the brain can affect our recall of the memories contained therein. Carl Wernicke’s work on auditory aphasia in 1874 added more credence to the theory that specific kinds of memories are to be found in clearly delimited portions of the brain. As Robert M. Young has noted, the “literature on cerebral localization after 1873 became so extensive that contemporary reviewers listed hundreds of references.”⁸ The scientific study of memory worked within the strong paradigm of cerebral localization. Understanding how the brain was put together was thought to be a key to the analysis of specific memory dysfunctions.

The doctrine of cerebral localization served well those French psychiatrists anxious to link their treatments with the more firmly established science of neurobiology.⁹ A disturbance of memory would thus be caused by a lesion or an “inflammation” of a part of the brain. The cause could either be “moral” or physical, but the effect would be described in either case in relation to a particular part of the brain. When Ribot published Les Maladies de la mémoire in 1881, he related many cases of individuals who suffered head injuries and could not remember any events from very specific periods of time. After certain physical trauma, either experiences are not registered by the brain or access to storage areas of memory or the stored images themselves are destroyed. On the other hand, Ribot also discussed many cases of amnesia where the lines between “moral” and physical etiology are blurred:

A shoemaker, overcome by an epileptic mania the day of his wedding, stabs his father-in-law to death. Coming to his senses after a few days, he had not the slightest knowledge of what he had done.¹⁰

A young woman, married to a man she loved passionately, during labor fell into a deep coma, after which she had lost the memory of the time that had passed since her marriage inclusively. She remembered very exactly all the rest of her life until then. At first she rejected with fear her husband and child when they were brought to her. Since then, she has never recovered the memory of this period of her life, nor the events that accompanied it. Through the authority of their testimony, her parents and friends persuaded her that she was married and that she had a son. She believed them because she preferred to think that she had lost the memory of a year rather than believing that they were all imposters. But her conviction, her conscience intime, had nothing to do with this. She saw before her her husband and her child without being able to imagine by what magic she had acquired one and brought the other into the world. (61)¹¹

Ribot explains the shoemaker’s partial amnesia as caused by the weakened consciousness that was brought about by the epileptic mania. The artisan did not have a problem of recall because the experience of his wedding day was never registered in his brain in the first place. Instead, the events that took place during his mania were like the events that we experience in a dream. While we sleep, Ribot pointed out, our consciousness is extremely weakened. So it was for the murderous shoemaker. Although he was more than a little active on his wedding day, his activity was not accompanied by sufficiently intense consciousness of what he was doing:

How to explain amnesia in cases where there have been states of consciousness? By the extreme weakness of these states. A state of consciousness is fixed definitively only by two means: intensity, repetition. . . . Here there is neither intensity nor repetition. (58)

The nervous system is capable of directing action without recording it because “a nervous state, sufficient for determining certain acts, is insufficient for awakening consciousness” (60). If consciousness is intense enough, memories are recorded and stored in their proper place in the brain.

The second case of wedding amnesia just described presented different problems for the philosophical psychologist. Here it was clear that the experience is at some point registered but subsequently lost to memory. Ribot describes a situation in which either memory residues or the faculty of reproducing these images is destroyed by illness. A “cerebral commotion” coul...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Nineteenth-Century Maladies of Memory
• Part 2: History and the Psyche
• Part 3: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics
• Part 4: Photography and Piety
• Coda: Risks And Limits of Liberal Education
• Notes
• Index