Ah, yes, Diane .... forgetting, omission, evasion, suppression ... defense,
emotion, survival .... I would take these as also a kind of remembering-E
... in the sense that they are a now-response to the beginning of a memory.
As I just wrote about factors that "select" and filter upwards to
consciousness possibly relevant-to-now memories, including deliberate
attention to the near-surface memory ... so also there is the pushing back
down, or deliberate attending-away, or other strategies ... and these are
signs of the near-conscious presence of the memory, and hence useful in
therapy ('resistance').
And then gaps. Not feeling the memory coming and getting away from it, but
just the blank places. We know there was memory-G of those times ... at
when later we do 'retrieve' what fits the gaps ... but nothing comes.
Because we don't let ourselves get near enough to experience that might
start to trigger, to nominate these memories for attention? Hard to do,
though possible. Perhaps more likely because there is already
counter-pressure, blocking well before the memories get near the surface.
Counter-selection. This would for me be very hard evidence of non-trivial
unconscious processes. Not just that there is a lot going on that we are
not conscious of, we know that must be true. But that there is something
like Will, even Will contrary to conscious Will, that operates at these
deeper levels. Of course this is still rather metaphoric. But I can imagine
coherent, regenerating patterns, themselves the product of lived
experiencing (conscious and unconscious), which operate like conscious self
(e.g. they can selectively enhance or repress other patterns depending on
their linkages to emotional responses or maybe meanings of other sorts as
well) but as "pre-selection", at the level of neuronal activity where there
are many little 'memory candidates' or 'thought candidates' with fairly low
'intensity' (i.e. noticeability, salience ... could be number of neurons
firing, could be degree of phase coherence across groups, could be
ramifications that if extended would eventually trigger attention centers,
etc.), early on in the selection processes that eventually present one or a
few 'survivors/fittest' for conscious attention.
I think this notion is just as scary as Dr. Freud's ... that we are not the
only 'ones' inside us ... even if these 'others' are not quite personae,
are something more elementary and mono-functional ... parts of 'us' doing
their job whether we want them to or not.
So, then, the social. Definitely. In the triggering, and the selection, I
am guessing that the dominant factor over longer times is the activity we
are engaged in, and such activities are normally -- in the evolutionary and
historical sense -- social. We are so often engaged in collective
remembering, and it's fairly clear that we remember a lot more when we are
doing collective, mutually stimulated recall. We play off each other's
pieces of the memory puzzle.
And as we know from work on social activities like trials and witnesses
accounts, and as you say, each of us, even in collective recall, is working
to make sense ... to have the pieces fit together in a culturally normative
pattern, to tell a familiar kind of story. Even if we each get somewhat
different stories. And we may work toward convergence of these stories, or
split into factions favoring different stories, and the story-pattern we
are committed to certainly is a major factor in the selection and filtering
of memories (what we recall) and also in how we fill in the dots in what is
(I propose) bio-remembered to get what is felt-remembered (see my other
posting on compression algorithms for memory).
And not to forget LSV, we internalize the social ... the unconscious must
be partly organized as a conversation ... I imagine it as a lot of
simultaneous overlapping 'voices' (those partial-me patterns in the
unconscious) that do concurrent selection on the net or survivor pattern
(or self-consistent emergent resultant of interacting semi-autonomous
agents, in another language). Raising very interesting questions about
whether social formations, like narrative structures, also get embodied in
unconscious functioning, or only get layered on at the end, conscious
stage. Dreams have _some_ features of narrative structure ... but
rememberable dreams are perhaps the nearest to consciousness already of the
unconscious processes. Perhaps our memories of dreams are already
re-scripted a bit more toward narrative sense. Certainly they seem episodic
... lacking in longterm coherence, but with each scene, or each static
scenic configuration narratively recognizable, narratively adequate or
complete.
WAY too much! JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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