You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Memory, a topic that has played a significant role in the history of psychoanalysis, was especially dominant in Freud's early theorizing. Believing that “hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences” (Breuer and Freud 1895, p. 7), Freud sought the sources of pathology in early traumatic memories that have been repressed from conscious recollection. Bringing these cut-off memories to consciousness through the analyst's interpretation of the patient's free associations constituted Freud's earliest technique. Inherent in this early theory and technique was a view of memory as a storehouse for actual events, stacked and ordered within each individual, as Freud himself described: by chronology; by theme; and by oblique connections, like the knight's move in chess (pp. 288-289).
In Marking the Mind: A History of Memory, Kurt Danziger, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at York University, Canada, presents the case that Freud's view of memory is by no means the only way to understand what memory is and how it functions. Rather, Danziger argues that the conceptualization of memory has changed repeatedly over the course of Western intellectual history. By tracing the ways memory has been characterized in texts, from the ancient world to the present, Danziger illustrates how recent is our current view of memory as a distinct cognitive faculty within each individual; as an objective entity about which we are learning more and more through experimental and biomedical research; as having specific locations in the brain; as consisting of various kinds (e.g., short-term, long-term; episodic, semantic; procedural, declarative); as vulnerable to error and distortion; and so forth. We automatically think of memory as falling within the discipline of psychology. However, considering that psychology did not arise as a separate discipline until the end of the nineteenth century, how had memory been conceptualized before then?
Danziger begins his history in the ancient world with Mnemosyne, mo