Remembering is a natural exercise in human beings. We have the ability to reconstruct lived moments. Images come to our mind, brought by a smell, a taste, something observed or heard. It is the hook that is needed to awaken a chain of images that we associate with an emotion. Nice, nasty. We are those magical beings who manage to be in another place only with our imagination in an instant. Remember to shelter in the soul, or the need to quickly get out of that place in which we feel imprisoned.
We do it through memory, which we can define as the brain’s ability to retain information and retrieve it voluntarily. That is, this capacity is what allows us to remember facts, ideas, sensations, relationships between concepts and all kinds of stimuli that occurred in the past.
Freud marked an important relationship: between remembering, repeating and elaborating.
Away from the intention of involving the reading of psychoanalysis, I take these ideas to transfer them to everyday situations that can contribute to the understanding of an action. We could also make some parallelism with instances or social experiences.
We remember why something caused it. But why at that time and not at another? What from the past comes to us and assails us? What do we usually repeat with the apparent feeling of not being able to avoid it? Of so many millions of memories. Why that and not another? Do we perhaps need to review something that does not let us advance in our evolution? Something to drop, to recover, to review or repair?
Having memory and remembering facts, we can differentiate them
Memory is a brain exercise meanwhile, remembering is an emotional exercise since it is always associated with something experienced. Heat or cold, smells, flavors, pleasant or not, etc.
Our memories are not objective. Emotion is involved and we transfer that to current life.
To be more didactic I will still bring a grandmother’s saying “He who burns with milk, sees the cow and cries.” Now I wonder if Freud was not inspired by such wise words. (just kidding, psychoanalysts don’t get mad).
Memory and repetition: I remember the milk and I cry. Actually, it’s not the milk, but the unpleasant sensation of being burned, the pain or the burning. Other images will be associated later, such as the action that triggered the burn, what happened afterwards, if I was treated by doctors, what prevented me from the accident, and a whole context associated with emotions.
Perhaps, I could not cry when I see the cow if I elaborate the situation, if I can think about what mistake I made to cause the accident and stop projecting situations on the cow that are probably my responsibility.
On the other hand, we also tend to fall into “the generalization of memory”. To use the same example, it would be something like, if I got burned by milk once, I’ll always get burned by milk.
We also have “the memory freeze” scene is milk on me. No modifications. When we fail to incorporate the context, the variables that happened surrounded by the accident, we will continue in that instance, frozen, without moving forward.
On the other hand, it would be the same otherwise. Staying only with the acts that did me good at a time assuming that it will be repeated that way over and over again.
Having memory, remembering, is an exercise that needs to be contextualized, in order to evolve.
* Educational psychologist, president of the Being Foundation. [email protected]
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