Vital Memory and Affect

Living with a difficult past

Steven Brown, Paula Reavey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317499480
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

Vital Memory and Affect takes as its subject the autobiographical memories of 'vulnerable' groups, including survivors of child sexual abuse, adopted children and their families, forensic mental health service users, and elderly persons in care home settings. In particular the focus is on a particular class of memory within this group: recollected episodes that are difficult and painful, sometimes contested, but always with enormous significance for a current and past sense of self. These 'vital memories', integral and irreversible, can come to appear as a defining feature of a person's life.

In Vital Memory and Affect, authors Steve Brown and Paula Reavey explore the highly productive way in which individuals make sense of a difficult past, situated as they are within a highly specific cultural and social landscape. Via an exploration of their vital memories, the book combines insights from social and cognitive psychology to open up the possibility of a new approach to memory, one that pays full attention to the contextual conditions of all acts of remembering.

This path-breaking study brings together a unique set of empirical material and maps out an agenda for research into memory and affect that will be important reading for students and scholars of social psychology, memory studies, cultural studies, philosophy, and other related fields.

1 The seven virtues of vital memory

DOI: 10.4324/9781315713939-1

You can't unring a bell

From the court records, it seems that Salomon R. Sandez had been very unlucky. Sat in his Chevrolet convertible outside the New Main motel in Los Angeles, on a spring evening in 1955, Sandez had probably not noticed the undercover police officers parked in front. Perhaps they in turn would not have noticed him, had it not been for the Mexican licence plate and his odd, anxious demeanour. He twice left the car, paced backwards and forwards, looked around and – as the officers later put it – ‘sort of wrung his hands’. In any case, this was enough to arrest him. At 8 p.m., a federal agent posing as ‘Benny Bean’ completed a sting operation in one of the motel rooms, arresting Vince Perno after a brief shoot out. ‘Benny’ fired a further shot outside the room to alert the waiting officers, who promptly pounced on Sandez. His bad luck put him in the dock along with Perno and four other defendants, all charged with importing narcotics into the USA.

The case against Sandez was not exactly watertight. When arrested, he was carrying a business card from a doctor in Tijuana. Written on the reverse side was the cryptic message ‘Vince, ? PL-97818’. The prosecution argued that, if the numerals were reversed, they matched the phone number of a local apartment from where Perno had made one of his many calls to ‘Benny Bean’. Other defendants had spoken of a mysterious middleman called Tutu. When asked by the arresting officers whether he was, in fact, ‘Tutu’, Sandez had agreed. Or at least, it appeared that he had agreed, because, as became clear during the trial, Sandez’s command of English was so limited that one witness was led to claim, ‘The man can’t speak English. He understands maybe a word or two’. Nevertheless, the jury felt they had enough to find him guilty.

Sandez appealed. His lawyers argued that his conviction had been influenced by a letter shown to the jury written by a defendant who had not been involved in the trial. Although it made reference to Tutu, the letter had not been thought sufficiently incriminating to bring its author to trial (not least because of some peculiar attempts to redact details in red ink). In fact, toward the end of the case, the prosecution had asked the jury to disregard this particular piece of evidence in relation to all the defendants, except Perno. However, could the jury members actually forget what they had read and heard described in open court? Or, as the appeal judges put it, was it possible to ‘unring the bell’ at such a late stage? For once, Sandez’s luck turned, and some, but not all, of his convictions were quashed.

The case of Sandez v. United States of America (1956) uses a neat piece of legal-speak to restate what we all find out at some point in our lives – you can’t unring a bell. You cannot simply forget, either when instructed or through sheer force of will, some piece of prior knowledge or an aspect of one’s past experience. To know something, to have seen or felt something, is to live with it, however inconvenient or difficult that may be. Chief Justice McBride, in a much earlier case (State vs Rader, 62 Oregon, 1912) commented on similar legal dilemmas with the observation that, ‘It is not an easy task to unring a bell, nor to remove from the mind an impression once firmly imprinted there’. The phrases ‘impression’ and ‘imprinting’ here are striking. They describe the act of making a mark in a surface through pressure. The empiricist philosopher David Hume made the notion of impressions on the mind central to his account of knowledge and understanding. ¹ Much later, the ethologist Konrad Lorenz would use the term ‘imprinting’ for the rapid, automatic learning by newly hatched birds of the characteristics of key stimuli, which then become behavioural models. ² Stephanie Meyer most likely had this in mind when writing the Twilight books, giving werewolves the ability to ‘imprint’ or ‘fall in love at first sight’ with significant others, to whom they are then unconditionally bound, as though by some gravitational force. ³ However, it may be that McBride had in mind the still relatively new technology of still photography, where images of the world were literally imprinted on light-sensitive plates and then transferred to photographic paper. One rapid exposure gives rise to a permanent mark. What we see in all these cases is the effects of a process that is immediate, irreversible and, to some degree, intractable. You can’t unring a bell . ..

This book explores the consequences of the irreversibility of particular kinds of experience for memory. We are concerned with experiences that are difficult, distressing, sometimes painful to recall and troublesome to accommodate in one’s current sense of self and ongoing personal relationships. These are experiences that ‘leave a mark’, that cannot be simply ignored or made irrelevant. Difficult experiences can become central to how a personal past is narrated. They become embedded in patterns of recollection that extend into other kinds of memory, lending them shape and emotional tones that they would not otherwise possess. Memories of troubling events can take on the status of defining experiences, becoming central to the life of the person who lays claim to them. It is in this sense that we use the term ‘vital memories’: memories that become pivotal to trying to make sense of a life.

The intractability of memory is not a new theme in psychology. One of Freud’s most significant insights is, of course, the idea that we never really forget anything that happens to us. ⁴ For Freud, knowledge of past events is permanently etched in our unconscious, much like the marks on the waxy surface of a child’s ‘magical writing pad’. Yet it is very difficult to read any individual mark, as each tends to disappear into the messy confusion of previous and subsequent marks. ⁵ Contemporary psychologists would refer to these kinds of memory as ‘available’ but not ‘accessible’. ⁶ They are there waiting for us, but there seems to be no sure or immediate route by which we can reach them (save that of dreams, free associations or slippages in consciousness for Freud).

The particular memorial qualities of difficult experiences have led to the widespread use of the notion of ‘trauma’. ⁷ Based around an explicit analogy with a physical wound, ‘traumatic memories’ are considered to be thoroughly disruptive, as corrosive of personal identity. There have been suggestions that traumatic memory constitutes a completely different means of accessing the past, compared with other forms of memory. ⁸ However, although it is undoubtedly the case that memories of events such as physical or sexual violence can be entirely overwhelming, they become interwoven with other kinds of memory. It is the patterns that result from the efforts to incorporate difficult aspects of one’s past into an accounting for oneself that concerns us in this book.

Mixtures and flows

Metaphors are indispensable tools for thinking about memory. ⁹ We have already encountered the ideas of impressions and imprinting and the analogies with wax tablets and physical wounds. None of these seems to us to capture the patterned, blended and composite nature of how one reflects on past experience. We invite you to think instead of memories of past events as mixtures formed by a huge series of individual elements blended together. It is possible to discern recognisable patterns or the outlines of particular episodes, but, over time, these fall rapidly back into the tangled whole. In Balzac’s short story The Unknown Masterpiece, the celebrated artist Frenhofer has spent many years working on his masterpiece, a painting called La belle noiseuse. ¹⁰ When he finally unveils it, no one can make out what it is meant to be. If closely studied, in one portion of the canvas there appears to be something resembling a foot emerging from a swirl of colours. The problem is that the painting is destined to never be finished – Frenhofer has continuously added more and more layers of paint and would undoubtedly carry on doing so if he had the chance. The outcomes of any given individual painting session are still there and could perhaps be partially discerned under particular conditions, but it is the perpetually unfinished whole that takes centre stage. ¹¹

Remembering is sometimes thought of using other metaphors, such as being like looking at a set of old photographs or searching through folders and libraries of stored information on a computer. However, it comes closer to our everyday experience to compare it to finding the outline of the foot in La belle noiseuse. Memories are part of a whole constituted by our ongoing, unfolding experiences. They become more or less visible and change in nature as that whole changes. William James tried to convince his peers in the late nineteenth century that any theorising of the psychological had to start from the idea that we are all works in progress, unfinished and changing as our lives progress. ¹² He promoted the phrase ‘stream of thought’ to describe personal experience as in motion, flowing, seeking out the as yet unknown. The image of a flowing stream suggests some powerful ideas about how we think and remember. A stream appears to flow in one direction, but in fact there are all kinds of patterns of turbulence and counter-flows. As the flow pushes forward, what happens downstream affects the patterns of flow upstream. If we try to trace the origins of the stream, we find ourselves lost in a mass of tributaries that come together in a confluence. As physicists have now come to see, apparently simple phenomena such as streams behave in very complex ways that are often not linear and involve changes in properties of the whole. ¹³ If we treat memory as a flow, it makes sense to say that, although we can never physically change the events we have experienced, their properties and qualities can be and are dramatically changed at any given moment by the overall movement of the ‘stream of thought’.

The French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose ideas were engaged with William James’s, used a related word, ‘duration’, to talk about the flow of experience. ¹⁴ Bergson, like James, argued that the psychological had to be treated from the perspective of movement and change. The fundamental fact of our existence is that we are never quite the same as we were, or will become. Bergson was well aware that this way of thinking about our lives could appear counter-intuitive. It is difficult, he claimed, to think about movement without starting from the idea of a clearly defined progression between points. ¹⁵ Surely our lives cannot be without order or predictability? Bergson addressed this with the example of waking up to the sound of a bell tolling. ¹⁶ When we first hear, we are taken with the sound itself. As it repeats, we start perhaps to count the tolls. In doing so, we are breaking our experience into parts, punctuating it into one chime following another. However, if we stop counting, we slip back into the sounds of the bells ringing, where each chime appears to partly merge with the last, as the pattern unfolds. This would be like listening to music, where the various lines of melody and rhythm combine such that what we have just heard already points forward to what is to come, without any apparent breaks: we are carried along with the flow. Bergson argues that ‘duration’, this form of experience without division, but with continuous qualitative transformation, is fundamental. We can, of course, attempt to break up our experience into distinct temporal or spatial units – and this is what the entire social machinery of modern bureaucratic and administrative techniques seeks to do – but this is a secondary process. Our lives flow, only subsequently do we add in the breaks and punctuations...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 The seven virtues of vital memory
• 2 The expanded view of memory
• 3 Memory and life-space: affect, forgetting and ethics
• 4 Feeling an ambivalent past: survivors of child sexual abuse
• 5 Managing the memories of others: adoptive parents and their children
• 6 Remembering with, through and for others: surviving the 2005 London bombings
• 7 Forgetting who you were: the forensic psychiatric unit
• 8 Recollection in later life: the reminiscence museum
• 9 Ordinary people living with a difficult past
• References
• Index