Autobiographical memory and his critics

Chapter 8 looks at the problems relating to memory and its transmission, which are crucial in the collection of life histories. We focus on the results of psychological and psychoanalytical studies on human autobiographical memory since their beginnings in the late nineteenth century. Over time, psychology and psychoanalysis developed different schools, which placed varying emphasis on the importance of studying memory. They include structuralism, functionalism, psychoanalysis, behaviorism, cognitive psychology, and evolutionary psychology. We deal separately with psychoanalysis, whose connections to neuroscience—discussed in greater detail in Chapter 9—are significant. The structuralist school, which used introspection, makes no contribution to the study of autobiographical memory, but it does offer interesting findings on the memorization of syllables alone, not of life stories. The functionalist school is barely interested in biographical memory. Its only representative, Galton, provided some elements—some important, others debatable—which we analyze. The behaviorist school, which enjoyed great success in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, totally rejected the study of mental imagery. In the end, it was the cognitive school that made memory the focus of its study in 1950. We show its many contributions to this field, with the use of data from official registers to verify major life events, and the use of neuroimaging. While evolutionary psychology contributes little to the study of memory, psychoanalysis takes us into new territory. This discipline, introduced by Freud in 1895, relied on Cajal’s discovery of neurons in 1888 as possible storehouses of memory. We describe and critique the way in which Freud incorporated this notion into psychoanalysis with the aid of the unconscious, and compare this with the picture provided by today’s neuroscience. The chapter’s conclusion looks at the challenges to the psychological approach generated by the replication crisis and to the broader notion of “statistical significance.”