Psychiatry

Schachtel, Ernest G. On Memory and Childhood Amnesia.

Silverberg, William V. Notes on ‘The Iceman Cometh.’

Molina, Miguel F. Study of a Psychopathic Personality in Guatemala.

Honigmann, John J. Cultural Dynamics of Sex.

Senter, Donovan. Witches and Psychiatrists.

Mead, Margaret. The Concept of Culture and the Psychosomatic Approach.

White, William Alanson. Medical Philosophy.

Schachtel, Ernest G. On Memory and Childhood Amnesia. The ambivalent attitude toward memory, especially toward its most potent form as embodied in the song, the epic, the tale, in poetry, music, fiction, and in all art, has accompanied the history of man. The modern popular attitude, so widespread in the United States that all art and poetry is sissy, is the latter-day implementation of the Platonic taboo. The work of Freud and Proust is referred to in some detail. This essay explores the dynamics of this conflict in memory which leads to the striking phenomenon of childhood amnesia as well as to the difficulty of recovering any true picture of past experience. The categories (or schemata) of adult memory are not suitable receptacles for early childhood experiences and therefore not fit to preserve these experiences, and enable their recall. The functional capacity of the conscious, adult memory is usually limited to those types of experience which the adult consciously makes and is capable of making. How well is the average highly conventionalized adult memory equipped to contain and recall the time and the experiences of early childhood? Very poorly or not at all. The incompatibility of early childhood experience with the categories and the organization of adult memory is to a large extent due to what may be called the conventionalization of adult memory. Conventionalization is a particular form of what one might call schematization of memory. The process of schematization and conventionalization and its effect on the raw material of experience, especially childhood experience, can