Memory: individual and collective

In a famous passage from the Confessions, St. Augustine argues that there are not, properly speaking, three times, past, present and future; time is essentially in the soul, in which things are present in various ways. What we call the present is the immediate perception of things, the future is the anticipated presence of things to come, the past is the soul's presence of past things: memory, therefore, is "the present of the past" [1].

Making present to the soul what has been therefore seems to be a strictly individual matter. So much so that John Locke, many centuries later, would connect memory to personal identity itself, observing that a person's identity reaches as far as self-awareness "can be brought back to any action or thought of the past" [2]. One can only remember what has been present to one's consciousness, since the latter is the power of the mind to "revive the perceptions it once had" [3].

If so, does it make sense to talk about collective memory? Yet, this is precisely what we talk about when we celebrate Remembrance Day: the need for widespread awareness of the terrible events of the Holocaust on a global level. Certainly there is no "collective consciousness" that can be the subject of such memory; however, if we look at how memory is actually produced, the idea of a collective memory appears more than sensible, and in some ways necessary [4].

We know, in fact, that memory is not a drawer in which we place images of past events, which could be "pulled out" like old photographs when we recall the memory. Each memory is instead a reconstruction that our mind operates starting from the fragments into which the impression of the event has been broken down in our brain; in this process, distorting elements can creep in, contaminating the memory of a certain event with that of other events and leading, in perfect good conscience, to the construction of "false memories."

Our memories often need to be integrated or corrected and this is necessarily a social process; as Paul Ricoeur observes, "we do not remember alone, but with the help of the memories of others" [5]. On the other hand, the processing of the memory requires that it be expressed in language, that is, placed in a possible story offered to others. Especially in relation to historical events of great significance and enormous collective importance, there is therefore a necessary relationship between the individual memory of individual episodes and the story of the many others which allow them to be placed in a broader framework, integrating and correcting them.

In this way, memory becomes a distributed cognitive phenomenon that feeds on the memories of single individuals, but can take shape in all its complexity only through the convergence of multiple narratives - autobiographical and historiographical, but also literary, cinematographic, theatrical - which they help shed light on events and elaborate their meaning. The collection and interpretation of this set of traces allow the creation of a collective memory.

Not everything can be remembered; there is an ecology of the mind that eliminates the superfluous and dispenses a necessary amount of oblivion. In certain cases, forgetting can even be a necessary condition for life, as for those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, for whom psychological and pharmacological interventions can be activated to actively remove memories  [6]. Certainly, many witnesses of the Shoah were dramatically persecuted by their memories and for some the hypothesis of induced oblivion could have represented a liberation; many others, however, preferred to walk the difficult path of memory in the shared form of storytelling, of social sharing of that experience.

Obviously no victim can be, in any way, forced to remember and contribute to the processing of collective memory. Today, when the number of direct witnesses to those events is increasingly dwindling, we must be particularly grateful to those who, like Liliana Segre, continue to nourish this heritage of collective memory; with the hope that making this past and its negative warning increasingly present to us will allow us to correctly interpret the present and above all to better direct the future.

References

[1] Agostino, Confessioni, XI,20, 26.

[2] J. Locke, Saggio sull’intelletto umano, II,27, 9.

[3] Ibi, II,10, 2.

[4] M. Halbwachs, La memoria collettiva, Unicopli, Milano 2001.

[5] P. Ricoeur, Ricordare, dimenticare, perdonare, Il Mulino, Bologna 2004, p. 54.

[6] A. Lavazza, S. Inglese, Manipolare la memoria. Scienza ed etica della rimozione dei ricordi, Mondadori, Milano 2013.