Editorial

Memories from the past mould the future by colouring the experience of the present. In clinical practice, when working with an individual patient, we call it transference. Not only the individual, but also a group has memories (1). Assman has constructed a field of study that he calls mnemohistory. It is a history of memories which is not built on facts, but which notates the past in the subjective way in which it is remembered. Mnemohistory studies what Ass-man calls cultural memory. Outside the written tradition, cultural memories are transferred from generation to generation subjected to a process of forgetting and reinterpretation. They thereby form the background for a collective identity, for religious and national value systems. As a whole, the community enacts patterns of behaviour, emotion, thinking and relating that are manifestations of its accumulated history. These memories affect the way in which facts are selected from the stream of consciousness, something that in its turn affects the response to the other. Old messages are easily repeated while a new and alternative repertoire of cues lives in the shadow for a long time. In periods of major shifts of paradigms, either on an individual or on a societal level, this alternative repertoire of cues gets a chance to organize the conscious perception of the world.

We currently live in such a shift in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the power balance between two superpowers. A rapid change takes place in all social areas marked by a dissolving of social values, an unsteadiness of work and living environment, a globalization of capital and employment, and a development of media to a new virtual dimension of reality. Some consequences of these changes were discussed in the last issue of International Forum of Psychoanalysis: “Identity in the postmodern world”. According to Huntington (2), this new development means that global politics is being reconfigured along cultural lines. People an