LONG PAST, SHORT
HISTORY: THE CASE OF MEMORY[1]
Kurt Danziger
I
thought today might be a good opportunity for reflecting on a centenary, a
centenary that I am sure will be news to many of you. Not that I think we
really need another centenary – we’ve got too many of them already - but this
one happens to be of rather special
interest to historians of psychology.
So
what centenary do I have in mind? Well, admittedly it’s a rather modest
centenary. It doesn’t mark the birth of a great personality or of a laboratory
but rather the birth of a slogan. It so happens that a catchphrase you all know
made its first public appearance in 1908. Here it is:
Psychology has a long past but only a short
history.
Ebbinghaus, 1908
These were the words with which Ebbinghaus began his popular general textbook of
psychology. As we know, they were the words of a slogan that quickly acquired a life of its own, often
repeated, most famously by E.G. Boring two decades later. The words functioned
as a declaration of independence for the new scientific psychology intent on
breaking any links with the preceding era of mere speculation.
Clearly, for Ebbinghaus, and his followers, the new autonomy of experimental
psychology had profound implications for the historiography of the discipline. On
the first page of his 1908 text he goes on to explain what he means: Before the
advent of modern psychology, he says, there was no “lasting progression”, no
“progressive development” in the subject. A basic structure, laid out long ago
by Aristotle, had lasted right into the 19th century without real change. That
was psychology’s long past – a time without progress. But now that psychology
had become scientific it had finally acquired a history, by which Ebbinghaus meant a story of change and cumulative
development.
In
the early years of the 20th century, the distinction between
psychology’s long past and short history had a provocative aspect because 19th
century books on psychology’s past had had no hesitation in presenting this
past as a history. But once experimental psychology had established an
irreversible institutional presence historians of psychology faced a problem:
What
exactly forms part of psychology’s “long
past”? What defines the boundaries of such a field? Before the 18th
century, at the earliest, there was no generally recognized conception of
psychology as a distinct subject area in the way we understand it. How then do
we decide what belongs to psychology’s past and what does not? As one
professional historian put it:
Histories of psychology….possess no rational criteria of inclusion or exclusion.
R. Smith, 1988.
As long as we
restrict ourselves to the more recent history of empirical psychology we are on
relatively firm ground: we can use
professional and institutional criteria to decide what is part of our topic and
what is not. But once we go further back, those criteria become useless. In
practice, what gets included in or excluded from psychology’s long past becomes
essentially a matter of convention. Of course, we can always give an
anachronistic psychological meaning to any and all reflections about human
experience. But this leaves so vast a field that we might well ask:
Then of what would History of psychology not be a History?
Graham Richards, 1987.
Does this mean we
should just forget about the long past that is claimed for psychology and
concentrate on its short history? Certainly, this is justified for many
specific investigations. But if we never took a broader perspective modern
psychology would begin to look like the result of some immaculate conception,
which it wasn’t. So what do we do about that long past?
One good reason why pyschology’s past is so hard to pin down derives from the
fact that psychology itself is not so much a unified subject as a loose assembly of topics and approaches
that is constantly changing. The very notion of A history of psychology implies an internal coherence that isn’t
there. One cannot expect history to supply the unity which the subject itself
lacks. So we have to adopt an approach to the history of psychology that is
based on the recognition of multiplicity rather than the myth of unity.
For the more recent history,
this approach is evident in studies that trace the development of various content
areas and of diverse professional and investigative practices. But psychological
concepts also have their multiple, though interlinked, histories. The meaning
of psychological research and practice is framed in terms of specific
categories, such as motivation, intelligence, behaviour, attitude, personality,
each of which has its own identifiable history. Some years ago I tried to trace
some of those histories in a book I called Naming
the Mind (1997). It turned out that virtually all of these categories only
acquired their current psychological meaning in relatively recent times. Their
history was co-extensive with the history of modern psychology. They might have
had a past, but it certainly was not a psychological past. The break between
their pre-psychological meaning, often moral or theological, and their
psychological meaning was quite sharp. So apparently Ebbinghaus
had been vindicated.
But
then I asked myself whether there might be other categories for which this
break was less pronounced. Very quickly, memory presented itself as a likely
candidate. Unlike most of the terms in the modern psychologist’s vocabulary,
memory has a truly ancient lineage. Plato and Aristotle engaged in speculations
about memory that attracted comment and discussion right up to the present day.
Ancient Roman writers addressed the subject of memory as part of their
discourse on rhetoric, a topic they took very seriously. Monastic authorities
of the Middle Ages added their own interpretation of the nature and uses of
memory. During the Renaissance there was an outburst of writings devoted to
memory, and over the centuries there was also speculation about a physical
basis for memory. In the late nineteenth century, memory becomes an object of
investigation for modern science.
I won’t pretend
that it was only this remarkable history that aroused my interest in memory.
Such an interest can safely be regarded as one of the symptoms of old age. The
day comes when you have to admit to yourself that your memory isn’t what it
used to be. For me, that day came around the time I was becoming intrigued by
the issue of psychology’s long past and short history. So academic and personal
motives converged nicely to send me off on what became a decade-long search for
memory and its history. The outcome of that search was a book, Marking the Mind: A History of Memory (
I
would like to use my remaining time to share with you some of the things I
found out about memory that seem to have a bearing on the relationship between
psychology’s long past and short history. As one would expect, there is both continuity
and discontinuity in this relationship. Much of the discontinuity is fairly
obvious, and there is no need for me to go over familiar territory: the
features that make the modern scientific approach to memory different from what
went before. Let me rather mention some of the historical continuities that
show the break between scientific and pre-scientific to be not quite as sharp
as it is often made out to be. After that, I will briefly mention one of the less
obvious aspects of discontinuity.
One
widely recognized link between ancient and modern ideas about memory is their
common dependence on metaphor. Whenever people have tried to come to grips with
the nature of memory they have found it virtually impossible to avoid the use
of metaphors, especially metaphors of storage, of course.
We make search in our memory for a forgotten
idea, just as we rummage our house for a lost object….We turn over the things
under which, or within which, or alongside of which, it may possibly be
William James, 1890.
But this is just one example among
an uncountable number stretching over many centuries. At the end of the
seventeenth century, John Locke referred to memory as ‘the storehouse of our
ideas’. Well over a thousand years earlier, the storehouse metaphor had been
celebrated by
Doing memory experiments did not
mean escaping from an age-old metaphorical tradition, because it was difficult
to describe what experiments told us about memory without having recourse to
metaphor. When trying to explain the way memory worked 20th century
psychologists regularly invoked storage
metaphors, as people had been doing for about two thousand years. This
historical continuity was no secret (Roediger, 1980),
and metaphors of memory were sufficiently topical to be discussed in journals
such as Behavioral and Brain Sciences
(Koriat and Goldsmith, 1996).
What accounts for the longevity of storage
metaphors? Why do they seem so natural? Is there something that supports these
metaphors’ persistence ? I think we can find a clue to the answer in the fact
that physical storage was only an extension of earlier and persistent
references to another kind of storage, the storage of symbols.
If we go way back to the earliest examples of
storage metaphors we get to Plato’s suggestion that we should think of memory
as analogous to making impressions on wax. Why wax? Not only because of its
physical properties, but because in Plato’s time tablets coated with wax were
commonly used as writing surfaces, and it was specifically the impressions made
in writing that were to be regarded as analogous to memory traces.
It seems to me that the conjunction of memory with sensations, together
with the feelings consequent upon memory and sensation, may be said as it were
to write words in our souls.
Plato.
Plato was only the first in a long line of
authors who depicted memory as a kind of inner writing. It’s an analogy that
runs like a red thread through the history of memory and is implicitly
acknowledged in more recent theories of symbol storage.
Memory
storage is a metaphor, yes, but it is based on something more than a mere
analogy. It is based on a real peculiarity of human memory, the fact that people
do their remembering in interaction with memory aids. These aids, whether they
be marks on stone, letters on wax tablets, or programmable silicon chips, serve
as an external memory that greatly magnifies the scope of whatever internal
memory capacity humans may be endowed with. By the time people began to
speculate about a memory inside them, that internal memory had already become
quite dependent on an apparatus of external memory that kept on growing. It is
hardly surprising that this visible apparatus always supplied the models for
conceptualizing the operations of an invisible memory usually located inside
our heads. Metaphors of memory were usually derived from the technology of
memory, and as that technology developed, so the metaphors changed their
concrete form, from wax tablets to books to computer programs. But
technological developments only delivered improved variants of the operation of
symbolic inscription that remained the basis of external memory. As long as
people made use of an external memory based on technologies of inscription they
had an ever present source for metaphors of internal memory.
Our visible success in building up the apparatus
of external memory should not make us forget that there is a long history of
attempts at developing a technology of internal memory. In ancient
So it
is not altogether true to say that the past only speculated about memory,
whereas nowadays we practice planned interventions in its operations and
scrutinize the results. In fact, since ancient times, theorizing about
memory was accompanied by planned attempts to intervene in its operations. We
have to add mnemonics, the technology of internal memory, to the factors that
link different periods in the history of memory.
Just like the
technology of external memory, the technology of internal memory underwent
considerable change in the course of time. From Roman times until the Renaissance
period visual imagery remains, not the only, but the most favoured
tool for memory training. To get some idea of how this was supposed to work,
let us look at two illustrations from a widely used book on memory training
published in Venice in 1533 (Romberch). Imagery was
to be used in two steps. In the first step you establish a stable background
image that you can conjure up at any time. This background image should have
several distinct locations or “places”, such as the chapel, barber shop, etc.
of the village used as a background in the first illustration.
Then, in the
second step, you mentally place images of various concrete objects at specific
spots in the background image. These concrete images are chosen so that they
will remind you of particular topics you want to address during your speech,
sermon, or argument. While speaking, you take a mental walk through your
background image and come across your previously chosen topics one by one in a
pre-determine sequence. The main point to note about this example is the way the
whole process assumes that people already have or can easily acquire great
facility in forming and manipulating visual imagery.
I am sure you have
all been wondering how anyone could actually believe that such a cumbersome
procedure, which seems to impose extra demands on memory, could function as a
memory aid. Yet, procedures of this kind were taken very seriously over many
centuries, even by individuals about whose considerable memory skills there is
no doubt, for example St. Thomas Aquinas. How does on explain this?
One thing we do
know. The popularity of imagery as an aid to memory training takes a nose dive
after the end of the 16th century. By the mid-18th
century the most successful manuals on the art of memory were emphasizing
altogether different systems of mnemonics that privileged purely verbal methods.
Some historians have linked this to the rise of Protestantism and the Puritan
suspicion of imagery in general: the truth is in the word, not in ‘graven
images’. There was a drive to dump religious imagery – iconoclasm, a call to
smash the images. In some influential circles this was generalized to human
thought: serious thinking, scientific thinking, is incompatible with the
analogical thinking encouraged by imagery. It has been suggested that this
constituted a kind of “inner iconoclasm” (Yates, 1966). Be that as it may, the
point I want to emphasize here is that the technology of internal memory, like that
of external memory, is not static but is subject to historical change.
Perhaps we should
regard the more recent switch to empirical investigations of memory phenomena as,
among other things, a further development in the technology of internal memory.
Historically, concern with memory always had a speculative, theoretical, aspect
and a practical, interventionist, aspect that often influenced each other. This
continued after the introduction of empirical methods. Certainly, memory discourse changed after the introduction of modern
methods of investigation. But the change was not absolute; there were elements
of continuity. Quite generally, mnemonic procedures and the procedures
of memory research resemble one another in that both involve deliberate, planned
interventions in the spontaneous operations of memory. More specifically, the most
favoured materials
during the first century of memory research strongly resembled the kind of
material that had become prominent in post-Enlightenment mnemonics. I have just
mentioned that in the history of mnemonics we can observe a significant break
around the 17th century when the old preoccupation with visual
imagery is replaced by a new focus on verbal elements and the associative links
between them. When memory research made its appearance in the late 19th
century it showed the same preference for verbal or quasi-verbal content over
imagery that had become common in modern mnemonic systems and the same tendency
to present this content in the form of lists of discrete items to be memorized.
It seems the relationship between psychology’s
long past and short history may be more complicated than Ebbinghaus
had imagined it would be. In the case of memory, which was after all the topic
on which his reputation was founded, there are inconvenient facts which make
one skeptical about his simple scheme. There are continuities which bridge the
break between ancient past and recent history, and there are previous
historical breaks which, from a broader perspective, may be as important as the
break in Ebbinghaus’ lifetime.
My point is that the change from long past to
short history involved more than the adoption of empirical methods. I do not
want to question the importance of that adoption, but taking a longer term view
enables one to see that the more recent period has links to the past that are
rendered invisible by insisting on a complete break. Any exclusive focus on the
advent of experimentation also obscures other
differences between the more recent and the more remote past that deserve at
least equal attention. I don’t really have time to go into this, but I would
like at least to point to one of these other differences to give you an
indication of what might be involved.
One profound
change began at roughly the same time as the break between psychology’s long
past and short history, that is to say, the latter part of the 19th
century. When one has been following memory discourse over the centuries one
becomes aware of an unmistakable change of focus at that point. Within a
relatively few years there is a surge of interest in the negative aspects of memory, forgetting and memory
pathology. In the past, there had been plenty of interest in memory but almost
no interest in forgetting. The conviction that to understand memory one must
pay attention to its failures and malfunctions is specifically modern. So when
psychologists began to follow Ebbinghaus in studying
memory by analyzing forgetting they were being more revolutionary than they
perhaps realized. The more general fascination with memory pathology that
starts in the 19th century and gathers momentum in the 20th
is absolutely distinctive for the modern period.
Where
does all this leave the distinction between long past and short history? Not
altogether in the dust, because in many respects things did take a radically
new turn around the time that modern psychology made its appearance. But this
was not the beginning of history any more than 1990 was the end of history, as
was one claimed. Ebbinghaus may have been a bold
scientific innovator but history was not his strong point. He thought the
history of modern psychology would become a story of cumulative progress, where
facts would put an end to a long past of conflicting speculations. Well, that
is not quite what happened. If anything, the switch to empirical methods
increased controversy. Experimental research had too many unrecognized ties to
the past and to the broader historical context to provide the answers that
would make interpretive controversy obsolete.
At this point I can reveal that Ebbinghaus did not invent the distinction between
psychology’s past and its history, he changed its meaning. If we turn to what
would have been a standard text in Ebbinghaus’
environment, Max Dessoir’s History of Modern German Psychology, republished six years before Ebbinghaus’ book (Dessoir, 1902),
we already find the distinction between a past and a history, though it has a
different significance. Ancient Indian psychological thought, according to Dessoir, forms part of modern psychology’s past, but it is
not part of its history because there is no historical link between the two.
History implies a continuous connection between past and present:
A historical connection exists when the past
continues to affect the present.
Dessoir, 1902.
Dessoir’s
text dealt mainly with philosophical psychology, a topic that Ebinghaus thought was no longer relevant to what
experimentalists like himself were doing. By introducing the contrast between
psychology’s long past and short history Ebbinghaus
was emphasizing the break that had recently occurred within western psychology,
whereas Dessoir had focused on the continuity. A
century later, it may at last be possible to appreciate both points of view.
REFERENCES
Danziger,
K. (1997). Naming the mind: How
psychology found its language.
Danziger,
K. (2008). Marking the mind: A history of
memory.
Dessoir,
M. (1902). Geschichte der
neueren deutschen Psychologie.
Ebbinghaus,
H. (1908). Psychology: An elementary
textbook.
James, W. (1890) Principles of psychology.
Koriat,
A. and Goldsmith, M. (1996). Memory metaphors and the real-life/laboratorycontroversy: Correspondence versus storehouse conceptions
of memory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences,
19, 167-228.
Plato. The collected dialogues of Plato, (
Richards, G. (1987). Of what is
history of psychology a history? British Journal
of the history of science, 20,
201-211.
Roediger
III, H.L. (1980). Memory metaphors in cognitive psychology. Memory & Cognition, 8, 231-246.
Romberch,
J. (1533). Congestorium artificiosae memeoriae. http://www.gnosis.art.pl/iluminatornia/mysterion/romberch04.htm
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Yates, F. A. (1966). The art of memory.