Unit 4  Section 1 Excercise 4 Therapy: The role of memory
Read the following two brief excerpts, one from a novel, and one from an essay on memory.
1. From Renate Welsh's Dear Sister, a novel.
“When you’ve talked about something, it stays” she said after a while. “Maybe that’s why people keep a diary—because then they have it in words and it doesn’t get lost that easily.”
Sefa answered that what one told too often also got lost. A story repeated dwindled into anecdote, pressed flat like flowers in a herbarium. Sure, the loss was different than the loss of things forgotten, but it was still without juice, without scent, without life. Words can stimulate memory, but there is also the danger of covering them over.
“But that happens only when you dress up a memory to make amusing points when you tell your story, When the words become more important that what they mean. I imagine that it must be possible to reinvigorate a dried up memory if you stick it in the right sort of water. Like the magic flowers we had when we were children.” p. 186. From Renate Welsh, Dear Sister, Translated from the German
2. Npw read the excerpts below. They are from an essay "Why Remember?" by Gilbert Meilaender
Each of us is constantly active in memory, constructing and reconstructing the story of his or her life. We forget some things, of course, as we must. And over time we give new and different significance to events we might once have thought fixed in their meaning; they take on a new shape as the overall shape of life changes. But to construct the narrative of one’s life not through thought and conversation, struggle and prayer, but simply by erasing some of the materials of that life is to risk losing what is essential to being human. If we cannot say who we have been, we can never know who we are. Our humanity lies not in mastery over the construction of our life story but in the virtues by which we accept the limits of the body, live truthfully in the face of the past, and seek to give new meaning to what is painful or misguided in that past.
It is true, of course, that the more painful the memory, the more difficult it may be to believe that anything in the future could transfigure it or could draw it into a life story that we could bear to acknowledge as our own—and the more tempted, therefore, we may be to seek a technological fix. At the very end of the story of Job, in its canonical version, the Lord restores Job’s fortune—indeed, his material and familial blessings become even greater than they were before his trials. Scholars, of course, often characterize this prose epilogue as an addendum to the poem that tells Job’s story—an addendum that drastically alters the story’s meaning. Instead of a poem in which Job simply suffers inexplicably, we are given—with the epilogue—a story in which Job’s suffering is finally redeemed and given coherent meaning.
Link to Unit 6 Aging
Study Questions
- How might you relate the dialogue in Dear Sister excerpted above, to the role of memory in therapy? Link to Unit 3 Patient experience trauma and recovery
- If, as Meilaender claims, human life has a narrative quality, then how do tragedies, such as serious medical illness, fit into this narrative? Can such events enhance one’s life, or only detract from it?
- If we cannot know the full significance of any moment in the story of our life unless and until we can read the story as a whole, what does this say about the limits of our autonomy? How “informed” are the decisions that we make?
- Is Meilaender too optimistic or sanguine about our ability to integrate painful memories into a larger life story? Is it true that “there is no past so painful that it cannot be transfigured and redeemed in a truthful story”?
- What does Meilaender’s essay suggest about the most appropriate way to heal painful or disturbing memories?
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