Forget about It!

For those who inhabit the psycho metaverse, the following information will be welcome. For those who are unfamiliar with the history of psycho therapy, it will be illuminating, and perhaps even enlightening.

It all began with Freud. I am sure you know that Freud’s first theory of hysteria had it that hysterics were trauma victims, sexual abuse victims, who had forgotten what had happened to them. He proposed that such forgetting constituted a repression. In truth, this was his first use of the term. Anyway, if such was the case, the way to cure the problem was for the patient to recall the trauma, and then to process it-- that meant, to reconstruct a life narrative that included it.

One understands that Freud eventually shifted his focus, away from the abuse that had occurred toward the patient’s wish that it had occurred. That there was something deranged about the notion that patients were suffering because they could not accept that they had wanted to be molested did not cross very many minds at the time.

Still and all, the profession did not entirely dispose of the notion that people were suffering mental illness because they had forgotten what had happened to them. The treatment modality morphed into a search for repressed thoughts, feelings, fantasies and the like-- the ones that would show how much the patient really, really wanted to be abused. So, from forgotten events to forgotten desires.

As for the larger trope, filmmakers were perfectly happy to work with the repressed memory theory, and made some important films in which patients were cured once they recalled what had happened in their past. Think of Suddenly, Last Summer and Spellbound. 

And, of course, the offshoot called recovered memory therapy set about trying to induce patients to recall memories that had presumably been forgotten. You know-- your father had murdered your best friend and buried her body in the garden.

As you know, this therapy is dubious, at best, but still it keeps alive the notion that remembering is therapeutic and that forgetting produces neurosis-- or anxiety and depression

I will add, but do not recall with any precision, that some research has suggested that we do not retain memories of everything that has ever happened. Memory cells seem to have an overwrite feature, whereby new memories write over old memories. The last memories cannot then be recovered.

Anyway, the new research suggests that the human mind-- I trust that you have one-- has both remembering and forgetting functions. Presumably, if you remember too much you get mired in the past. If you forget too much you will continue to make mistakes. It is good to learn from the past, but only when it becomes part of planning for the future.

Neurologist Scott Small reports the research findings:

Memory and forgetting work in unison. We depend on our memory to record, to learn and to recall, and we depend on forgetting to countervail, to sculpt and to squelch our memories. This balancing act is, as it turns out, vital for our cognitive functioning, creativity and mental health.

Rather than think that forgetting constitutes repression, or that it shows how much we want to deny the truth, we should understand that normal forgetting is a good thing:

New insights into neurology, computer science, psychology and even philosophy illustrate how normal forgetting is indeed beneficial. What clearly emerges is that memory needs to be counterbalanced by forgetting in order to successfully live in a world that is not only blooming and buzzing with information, but also with information that occasionally stings. By freeing our minds, forgetting liberates us from the drag of memories that moors us in unnecessary details, that imprisons us in pain and in looping obsessions. Forgetting, therefore, is not a nuisance, not a failure, but rather is nature’s gift that allows us to be smarter, better, and happier people.

A useful point, especially since the old theories about memory and forgetting tended to focus on events and ideas that made for good narrative. Many memories, Small suggests, are trivialities, unworthy of very much reflection, likely to save us from wasting time on unimportant details.

Some people, of course, can never give up the past. They insist on defining themselves in terms of past grievances, even grievances that have gone back centuries. They can solve their problem by learning to forget-- and to forgive:

If you know someone whose personality is embittered with pain, who lives a lonely life of fear and trembling, who is vindictive or vengeful, or even ruthless with rage, you know someone who’s memory-forgetting balance of emotional memories is off kilter with too little forgetting. Intuitively, it makes sense that we sometimes need to “let go” of hurt and resentment to preserve close friendships and that we need to forget in order to forgive. 

“Letting go” is just one of the many colloquialisms that implicitly nod in recognition and gratitude toward our brain’s forgetting mechanisms.

Again, a very salient point. If we want to overcome our past, we do not just need to learn how to forget, but we need to learn how to forgive. Of course, you can't forgive if you can't forget. For those who prefer a Biblical text, see the book of Ezekiel, Chapter 18.

Interestingly, Small suggests that creative people are capable of exceptional forgetting. This might mean that they do not get mired in the past, in past failures or even past successes:

If you know someone who is very creative, that person is endowed with exceptional forgetting.  Testimonials of creative people in all walks of life, and tests of creativity, shows that creativity requires that we first form lots of memory associations in our minds. But critically, for creativity to happen these memories need remain loose and playful for those eureka moments, a looseness that requires forgetting.  Emerson has a quote that captures this when he says that “Imagination is the morning of the mind, memory its evening”. And in fact, we now know that one main purpose of sleep is, what has been described in the sleep literature, to “smart forget”.

And then there are those who cannot forget, who are cut off from normal social activities because they are mired in the past, inhabiting a fictional world where they are constantly rehashing past sins and failings:

If you know someone who is xenophobic, who tends to obsess about their social circle, whether a clan or even a country, you know someone whose communal memory-forgetting balance is off kilter with too little forgetting. “On Nostalgia’ was a medical thesis written in 1688 by a young Swiss doctor named Johanus Hofer. Hofer invented the term Nostalgia to describe what he proposed was a new medical condition which is a brain disordered with too much memory, too little forgetting, about our beloved homelands, were we become so obsessed with these wistful memories that it becomes a mania. To quote from this thesis, patients afflicted with this condition are simply unable to “forget their mother’s milk”, and that “mediation over the fatherland” results in “a stupidity of the mind”.

It is always encouraging to learn of a seventeenth century physician, named Johannes Hofer, who exposed the value of forgetting over three centuries ago. I will say, even if I am only speaking for myself, that I had not previously heard the name. 

In any case, Small suggests that we can cure our tendency to remember too much by socializing with others. It gets us out of our minds and into the world. Surely, belaboring your past grievances will not help you to get along with other people. Or else, the positive experience of getting along with other people will make past memories feel less compelling and a less attractive habitation:

From the new science of forgetting I have come to appreciate a simpler and more elegant way to enhance our innate capabilities to emotionally forget: socialize, engage life with humor, and always, always try to live a life glittered with the palliative glow of love.