On his book Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past
Cover Interview of November 13, 2011
In a nutshell
Memory, Trauma and History is comprised of essays that fall into five overlapping subject areas: history and memory; psychoanalysis and trauma; postmodernism, scholarship, and cultural politics; photography and representation; and liberal education. My concern in all of these areas is how people make sense of the past, a question that reverberates across the social sciences and the humanities.
In the first section I examine how doctors in France in the nineteenth century recognized pathologies of memory. What was their conception of a normal memory, and how did this figure in their diagnoses of abnormalities? These essays deal with the diseases of amnesia, split personality, nostalgia and hysteria.
Subsequent sections deal more with the theoretical approaches to normal and abnormal connections to the past. How does psychoanalysis change our relation to making meaning from memory? What do postmodernism and photography have to teach us about the politics and aesthetic choices we make in piecing together our histories? These are the kinds of issues that interest me in my exploration of particular thinkers and artists.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Memory, Trauma and History is comprised of essays that fall into five overlapping subject areas: history and memory; psychoanalysis and trauma; postmodernism, scholarship, and cultural politics; photography and representation; and liberal education. My concern in all of these areas is how people make sense of the past, a question that reverberates across the social sciences and the humanities.
In the first section I examine how doctors in France in the nineteenth century recognized pathologies of memory. What was their conception of a normal memory, and how did this figure in their diagnoses of abnormalities? These essays deal with the diseases of amnesia, split personality, nostalgia and hysteria.
Subsequent sections deal more with the theoretical approaches to normal and abnormal connections to the past. How does psychoanalysis change our relation to making meaning from memory? What do postmodernism and photography have to teach us about the politics and aesthetic choices we make in piecing together our histories? These are the kinds of issues that interest me in my exploration of particular thinkers and artists.