Autobiographical memory: a historical prologue

Abstract

When we speak of autobiographical memory we are referring to the memories a person has of his or her own life experiences. Like many other aspects of human behavior, the study of personal recollections predates the emergence of psychology as a discipline. From the beginning biographers and historians have used personal recollections to construe the individual and collective past. The archival function of memory has often been given primary emphasis in biographical and historical work. According to this view, life memories are time capsules, records of an unrepeatable past. As such they can be used both to recount the past and to teach lessons for the future. The intimate association between memory and narrative arises from this urge to use the past to instruct present and future generations. An awareness of the fallibility of memory, however, is as old as man's fascination with memory itself, and efforts to authenticate and verify recollections by various means (e.g., documents, corroborative reports from contemporaries) are among the factors that distinguish history and biography from legend and folklore. Historians and biographers were and remain concerned with the construction of judicious accounts of the past. They are not concerned with remembering per se; that has become the province of psychology. We can trace the beginnings of systematic empirical research on autobiographical memory to Gallon and Freud. Both were contemporaries of Ebbinghaus, but both established traditions of memory research quite different from his, and quite different from each other's.

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