LAPSES OF MEMORY

Taranaki Daily News, 27 January 1933, Page 4

LAPSES OF MEMORY

EVERYONE HAS THEM. TRICKS OF THE MIND. We all have lapses of memory occasionally, especially as we grow o^ er ’ ■When trifling, they do not bother us, but when they are great and cover whole subjects or long periods of time, then we are suffering from “amnesia. When the victim is a prominent man like - coi. Raymond Robins, everybody hears about it, but hundreds of similar cases never become public. Waldemar Kaempffert writes, in the New York Times: Since January, 1930, the Times has reported 64 cases of memory lapses as serious as that Of Colonel Robins. There must have been hundreds more of which the Press, never heard. Men and women who forget who they are, arid who wander about pathetically—totally new personalities so far as the world is concerned—are commoner than many of us suppose. The truth is that we all suffer a little from amnesia or loss of Who has not had the experience of trying to recall the name of a person or place, apparently in vain, only to have it flash up vividly in the mind hours later and for no apparent reason?,. “Normal amnesia” the physicians call the. phenomenon. Luckily we have the power of reconstructing and synthesising mental records of past events. It is only when the blankness covers long periods of time that amnesia becomes alarming, that we lose all recollection of, our real selves, and that we actually develop new personalities. Although they know., little enough about the mind and its vagaries, psychiatrists classffy amnesias. _ There are 'localised' amnesias, which afreet’ only certain groups of memories. FORGOT HOW TO ' WALK. A man may forget how to walk, for example, but not how to crawl or hop; his memory of writing may have gone, but he will still be. able to . talk. Then there are retrograde amnesias, in which it is impossible to remember what occurred immediately before some mental •or physical shock. The victim of anterograde amnesia forgets experiences almost as fast as they occur. Paramnesiacs try to fill the gaps in the memory by illusions. Mr. Kaempffert recalls a case mentioned by Dr. Coriot in his “Abnormal Psychology” where a woman found it impossible to recall the signature, date, place and bank on .which, a. cheque, given, ‘two. years previously had been drawn.

When she was placed in a “state of abstraction” by listening to a monotonous sound stimulus, all the facts , were recalled in a few minutes.» By means of crystal-gazing it was also possible to produce a vivid hallucination of the cheque. He goes on: Of course, the psychoanalysts have their own ideas about amnesia. To explain why we forget names, events, and even who we are, Freud invokes automatic censorship, conflict, repression, unconscious activities, and wish fulfilment. Mysticism and dernonology thus ’appear in a hew guise. ’

If a man forgets who he is or part of his life becomes a blank, Freudians say it is that the, wish not to remember blocks the. .wish . to. recall. ~ Niet??che pictures this conflict almost in psychoanalytic terms in “Beyond Good arid Evil.” ‘ ; -- • :

"I did that,” says my memory. “I could not have done that,” says my pride. Eventually memory yields.

No one can assert that the cure of amnesia is scientific in the sense that-the physician always knows exactly what he is doing and why. Many victims of amnesia either recover -their memories of past events spontaneously or have that memory reconstructed for them through a process of association. Forgotten events may be recalled in dreams. This has led the French psychologist, Janet, to conclude that it is not memory,, but .the power of synthesising past events that is lost in amnesia.