Abstract
The central argument of Vital Memory and Affect: Living with a Difficult Past, by Steven D. Brown and Paula Reavey, is that an essential aspect of memory is ‘setting specificity’. Remembering, in other words, is ‘an accomplishment of specific arrangements of persons and materials that together constitute very particular spatial and temporal relations’ (p. 210). This is notably the case for vital memories, which are defined as ‘memories that are in some way fundamental to a sense of who we are as persons. These are memories that are difficult, irreversible, that cause deep marks in the ongoing flow of our experience’ (p. xiii).
The authors propose an ‘extended memory’ thesis which ‘marks out a middle territory between cognitive science and the sort of constructionism found in discursive psychology’ (p. 40). In doing so, they expound what they refer to as the ‘material-communicative-neural process’ of memory (p. 43). Drawing on applied material – more specifically, memories of ordinary people living with a difficult past – the authors ‘focus on the practices and techniques that people who recollect vital memories have evolved and adopted for themselves’ (p. 210). Five distinct settings of memory are explored in different chapters, with each chapter emphasizing certain ‘virtues of memory’ along with numerous other concepts. The seven virtues – a play on Schacter’s (2002) seven sins of memory – are really themes, which include autobiography, agency, forgetting, ethics, space, institutional practices and affect.
The reported studies of memory settings are fascinating. I will briefly mention each study, bringing to the fore one point apiece that I found intriguing. In the first one, memories from survivors of childhood sexual abuse are explored, with attention to how the agentic self is positioned. In court settings, there is pressure to remember memories that demonstrate no or minimal agency (the perfect ‘victim’), whereas in therapy, memories may be ambiguous in terms of agency (even if there is no control over the abuse, children do what they can). The question is not which memory is correct, but how do these disparate setting specific memories ‘flow’ into and out of a person’s sense of agency in, what the authors refer to as, his or her ‘life-space’.
Another study looks at how adoptive parents handle memories of their children. In the United Kingdom, adoptive parents are required to make life-story books so their children are able to build a story of their life in the present and the future. This is above all delicate, if there is a history of abuse or neglect. Parents ‘vicariously manage’ memories of such events both in the books and in everyday life, making decisions about what their children can and should know. This might include the controlling ‘spectral objects’ (e.g. stuffed animals) from the pre-adoption past, which parents may hide so their child ‘provisionally forgets’ certain difficult experiences.
One section of the book delves into the 2005 London bombings, investigating the processes whereby survivors’ recollections are not entirely their own, but have been reconstituted by ongoing social and political interactions. In one poignant example, we learn that for one man, his bags were central to his memory of the subway blast, acting as a talisman of good fortune as they protected him from injury. Months after the blast, though, another survivor told him that his ‘bloody bags’ prevented help from reaching another passenger, who consequently died. The bags went from being a positive to an ambiguous ‘conceptual affordance’.
Forgetting in forensic psychiatric units is probed next. In this space that uneasily straddles the line between punishment and treatment, the main institutional goal is the management of risk. Instead of dealing with symptoms – typically connected to abusive events in patients’ pasts – the aim is to get them to self-manage their distress. As such, patients are stabilized in ‘perpetual presenteeism’ (italics in original) and access to their past and past identities are ‘displaced’ and forgotten. In such a setting, even the patients’ bodies are transformed (through weight gain due to medication use and inactivity) so they no longer have embodied memories of who they were, whether sexual or fit beings.
In the final chapter of applied material, recollections by older adults in a reminiscence museum are explored. This museum, in the style of a typical Dutch domestic space from the first half of the twentieth century, is full of mementos. One ethical objection to such museums for older adults is that it immerses them in the past, making social and cognitive engagement in the here and now more difficult. This is especially the case if reminiscences are not verbalized. The authors critique this assumption, arguing that this idea is premised on the faulty notion of a separation of the past and present and that ‘life-space, defined as possibilities for action that are relationally afforded to us … do not map onto metrics of distance or time’ (p. 207).
One challenge of including settings in remembering studies is that one ends up with a profusion of descriptions of specific memory environments. Therefore, the authors add a concluding chapter to make visible the features of the distinctive settings that were discussed. We get nine ‘translations’, which would have been better if integrated into appropriate chapter rather than splitting them off into a bookend chapter. These translations include, for instance, a river basin with tributaries demonstrating the flow of experience, a Möbius strip showing public and private inseparability, a water tub (an object in the museum) with arrows pointing out which represent mediated and unmediated relationships to the past and what looks like a dance step diagram that is meant is to highlight affect settlement and flow.
Although the book is purportedly rooted in psychology, many – in reality most – of the concepts will be unfamiliar to practising and research psychologists. The multidisciplinary breadth of literature is impressive, ranging from geography to feminist theory to mathematical philosophy; all the same, it is not always evident why the reader should know all of these things. The book is jam-packed with a variety of concepts and terms (some of which I’ve referenced in quotes) such as affordances, spectral objects, psychotopologies, life-space and so on. Consequently, the text feels stuffed, an abundance that will likely leave the reader – at least the typical psychology reader – puzzled and exhausted.
Don’t get me wrong. Just because something is unusual and conceptually demanding doesn’t mean it’s not worth sweating over. To the authors’ credit, they are trying to look at memory differently than the usual neurocognitive way. But I have to say they don’t make it easy. There are many reading snags and often by the time you figure out what is going on, you are onto the next idea. The drawback of this packed, sometimes esoteric, compilation of terms and ideas is twofold.
First, it unnecessarily complicates the book. As an example, Brown et al. (2015) have a chapter on the London bombings in a handbook of memory studies. The two chapters are very similar, containing the same quotes; some paragraphs show only a few minor word changes. What diverges from the handbook is the insertion of about five pages of conceptual reflections in the reviewed book, mostly at the beginning. After carefully reading both versions, I find the handbook chapter is not only more succinct but the main argument is clearer and more coherent, theorized in an understandable way.
The second drawback is that ideas are not given the opportunity to fully blossom. Again, to provide an example, one of the bridges to psychology is that of narrative, and the works referenced are almost exclusively from the psychologists Jerome Bruner, Martin Conway, Robin Fivush and Katherine Nelson. The work of these scholars is superb, but overall the information provided is limited and rather dated. Consequently, the authors come to some erroneous conclusions, such as narrative doesn’t take into account settings (see, for example, Gubrium and Holstein (2009) for how to analyse the interplay between narrative and narrative environments) or that ‘narrative thinking suggests an orderliness that vital memories lack. Recollections of difficult pasts do not always have a clear plot line and protagonists or stable evaluative attributions (p. 29)’. Indeed, most narrative researchers and scholars have moved beyond this Aristotelian view of orderliness (see, for example, Hyvarinen et al.’s (2010) edited book Beyond Narrative Coherence, which also deals with narrative environments).
This brings me to a further, conceptual criticism. It seems odd that the authors would dismiss the narrative fabric of autobiographical remembering so easily, particularly as all of the examples or data they present and analyse are in the form of stories–they are all memories recounted by language. Even the ‘silent memory’ of an elderly women fingering an old silk dress from the time of her youth in the reminiscence museum has to take shape via narrative if it is to be remembered at all. In forfeiting narrative, the authors foreclose the opportunity to delve into the very process by which vital memory expands and contracts temporally and spatially. The authors themselves argue for a less static, more contiguous view of memory throughout the book.
As Brockmeier (2015) argues, whenever it comes to autobiographical constructions, that is to scenarios that relate the present of rememberers to their past (often even in view of the future), it comes to narrative, to autobiographical stories. Actually, I see Brockmeier’s Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process as a complement to the reviewed book; both are committed to an expanded view of memory.
Another limitation of the book is that almost all of the applied material (with the exception of the museum study) is gathered from individuals in the United Kingdom. I suspect that the authors might argue that they are not making claims for universality. I do think, however, that drawing on memory practices from other cultures would in fact strengthen the authors’ setting specificity argument for memory. This bolstering would be evident in cultures that structure their narratives spatially (as opposed to temporally in most western cultures). In many North American indigenous societies, for example, stories and memories are only to be told in a certain spaces (Basso, 1996; Eades, 2015). When a memory is gone, the sense of place has disappeared. And vice versa; when a place is destroyed, the memory is eradicated.
This book is most appropriate for memory scholars in the fields of psychology, sociology and cultural studies who are advanced in their studies. As I’ve already insinuated, a basic familiarity with philosophical psychology and postmodern theorizing would help the reader. It might seem that clinicians are the target audience, but as a clinician myself, I don’t think there is enough of an applied focus.
The authors state their intention is to build a bridge for psychologists, but their labour may not result in many crossing. One reason is that many of them have a very specific idea of what evidence-based research is; typically something of the positivist sort. Although for most readers, the qualitative data in this book will be a relief – freedom from the ‘statistical abstraction’ gorilla – I fear that a substantial number of psychologists will find this type of science too occult. And that would be a shame because the authors make an important case.
As all scholars of memory – traditional, alternative or postmodern – know, even in our putatively ‘post-colonial’ cognitive psychology era of memory studies, the dominant illustration of memory in psychology textbooks and handbooks continues to be of stages (sensory, short- and long-term memory) and mechanisms (encoding, storing, (re)consolidation, retrieval). This rendering exhorts the internal over the external, the neurocognitive over the environmental and cultural, memory stability over fluidity and, in short, contracted over expanded views of remembering. After reading the book, we see even clearer the problems of these traditional views. Any efforts to advance alternatives are to be applauded.