False Remembrance: Husserl’s Account of the Distortions of Memory

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article demonstrates why Husserl struggled to understand the conditions of possibility of false memory, and how only the genetic dimension of his phenomenology enabled him to conceive of a specifically mnemic form of falsehood. For a false memory to deceive us, we must trust that it is true, but in order to have a phenomenology of its falsehood, the memory must appear as false. Husserl’s theory of false memory responds to both of these demands by showing how distorting syntheses (repression, filling-in, re-touching) conceal themselves, without making it impossible to discover their distorting effects. Key to meeting these two demands is Husserl’s account of how the unconscious functions as the “untrue” basis of memory, and how all recollections (both true and false) require affective, associative syntheses between present conscious experience and past unconscious experience, syntheses that are subject to many vicissitudes.