Historical reality and psychological truth

Abstract

The multiple personalities of Schalit's Josephus illustrate the inherent tensions, in historical writing, between the immutable facts of the past and their ever changing understanding. To reach us, the events must pass, not just through history, but also through the human mind; and in the process, historical reality and psychological truth may diverge. In the 19th century, eminent historians and psychologists alike adopted a naive realism towards the sources of the past - history and memory. In their view, the past persevered as an autonomous, pristine reality, hidden away in the recesses of the mind and of the present. Skillful inquiry could collect the historical artifacts or the patient's words and symptoms, progressively unearth the hidden materials, and restore the original events to our view. Ranke's famous remark that he did not want to judge, but only to show "how it really was,"1 often is taken as an expression of such positivism. Psychologists also viewed memory as a repository of past experiences, a storehouse of sensations that could be recovered. The past could be reclaimed through the redemption of memory. Thus Ebbinghaus argued that learning and memory occurred through the formation in the mind of associative links between different elements of experience, and that recall involved the reactivation of such bonds.2 He investigated "pure" memory by attempting to recall long lists of nonsense syllables (from a pool of 2,300) under varying conditions. Psychoanalysis also set out to retrieve the indestructible past. And (although they are in no way comparable) so does the current American therapy movement of "recovered memory," which claims to restore to patients their repressed childhood experiences of abuse, for which the patients require treatment and can litigate. In contrast to these views, it has become clear that man's relation to his past is much more complex and imaginative. Reality (past or present) is far too variegated to be apprehended as such. Borges's Funes the Memorious embodies