Krauss, Nicole (b. August 18, 1974)

A Last Glimpse Into the Mind of Oliver Sacks [from The New York Times Book Review]

December 10, 2017

"As this can happen many times in a life, a memory might be described as having a kind of geological history, with different stratifications going back through time, 'representing the psychic achievement of successive epochs of life.'"

Following the essay on Darwin's overlooked late writing is one about Freud's early work as a neurologist, and how those 20 years of research led him to arrive, by the 1890s, at a vision of the brain as dynamic, its functions not located in isolable centers, but rather achieved through complex systems, open to modification through experience and learning. Freud was prescient in his understanding of memory as a "transforming, reorganizing process"--essentially a creative process, in which memories are perpetually revised and recategorized to shape identity and support a sense of continuity as an individual. Writing to Wilhelm Fleiss in 1896, Freud used the word Nachträglichkeit --"retranscription"--to describe the brain's action of calling up a memory and revising it in response to fresh circumstances. As this can happen many times in a life, a memory might be described as having a kind of geological history, with different stratifications going back through time, "representing the psychic achievement of successive epochs of life." Freud wrote that he had come to explain psychoneuroses "by supposing that this translation has not taken place in the case of some of the material." In other words, that our psychological health depends on our ability to constantly revise and refashion memory to allow for growth and change, and the absence of this process--the stagnation of a memory, the brain's treatment of it as something fixed--leads to pathology.

Mineral::Geology Mineral::Stratifications

Reading

Nicole Krauss, "A Last Glimpse Into the Mind of Oliver Sacks," New York Times Book Review (December 10, 2017). <Link to NYTimes.com>

12/13/2017