Abstract
Narration and autobiographical memory have many common aspects: both concern the life of the subject in his relationship with others. Both have individual and collective aspects: they can materialize in objects, such as monuments, supports for writing or painting. However, they also have many different aspects that are difficult to recognize because in many cases to study memory implies the act of narrating.
Autobiographical memory is, in some ways, the “prius” of narration, what the narration comes from. It is a type of episodic and semantic, and in part procedural memory of life events that affect the Self. But, as the Self is itself part of social plots, autobiographical memory is not only about the Self but also about the Self in relation to others. An important feature of autobiographical memory is that the events of the past are remembered from the perspective of the present. This means that autobiographical memories are not built as an archive where memories of lived events are deposited, but as a process of continuous construction. Remembering is the act by which we reach or form this memory. In the construction of memories, we try to respect both a principle of coherence (with respect to the Self) deeply influenced by semantic memory (what I know) and a principle of correspondence (with respect to reality) more related to the episodic memory (what I remember).
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Notes
- 1.
While the correspondence historically refers to the adaequatio rei et intellectus of Aristotle and St. Thomas, the coherence arises from the need to relate what we learn to what we have already known and then to verify a compatibility of the new information acquired with other beliefs, memories, thoughts. These terms have been taken up by B. Russell (1912), who uses them in particular when he outlines his theory of truth.
- 2.
Repisodic memories are episodic memories that, referring to events of the same type that are repeated (for example, the father accompanies his son to school on Monday, Tuesday, etc., throughout the week), take on a generic character similar to the script.
- 3.
Specious present is that characteristic that the present perceptions have of being already in the past when they reach the consciousness because the perception of the duration is already remembered. This makes the notion of time even more uncertain because not only do the past and the future not exist, as Augustine says, but also the status of the present is precisely specious (James 1890).
- 4.
Edelman and Tononi think that in order to clarify the notion of the present recalled, it is necessary to concentrate the efforts on the primary consciousness, that is, the capacity to build a mental scene integrated into the present. This does not require language or a sense of the true and proper Self. It is their belief that the integrated mental scene depends not only on the perceptual categorization of incoming sensory stimuli—from the present—but, more importantly, on their interaction with categorized memories—with the past. They consider that integrated mental scene to be a “remembered present” (Edelman and Tononi 2000). For a study of the “present moment” see also Stern (2005).
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Smorti, A. (2020). Autobiographical Memory. In: Telling to Understand. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43161-7_2
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