Discussion of Jonathan H. Slavin's “‘If Someone Is There’: On Finding and Having One's Own Mind”

This discussion comments on some of the seeming contradictions about memory formation, as Slavin addresses them. To accept the value of her story about herself getting more clear and authentic, the patient had to tolerate that now she was with someone who thought that her psychological life was important, as well as confronting that she had been deprived of this crucial relational element during her development. The discussion concludes with its own (supportive of Slavin's position) argument that memory is a term we use to refer to a set of ongoing, inherently paradoxical and even, at times, contradictory mental processes and their outcomes. We keep trying to escape from the tension of this by creating an idiosyncratic version of a fully assembled jigsaw puzzle on the cover of its box and treating it as if it was what would emerge if all the pieces in the box were actually assembled. We don't notice that some pieces are missing, that we keep talking about one section as if it was the whole puzzle or that some pieces obviously (to others) have been forced together. In a sense, we are always trying to remember ourselves remembering.