Memory and aphasia

Memory and aphasia
No memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their collections. This is the certain conclusion shown by the study of dreams and of aphasia – those states where the field of memory is most characteristically narrowed. In these two cases, the frameworks become deformed, changed and partially destroyed, albeit in two very distinct ways. Indeed, the comparison of dreams and aphasia allow us to highlight two aspects of social frameworks, or two kinds of elements of which they are composed.

There are many different forms of aphasia, many degrees of reduction of memories that are its effects. But it is rare than an aphasiac forgets that he is a member of society. He knows well that the people who surround him and who speak to him are as human as he is himself. He pays intense attention to what they say: he manifests, in regard to them, sentiments of timidity and anxiety. He feel diminished and humiliated, is distressed and sometimes irritated because he cannot manage to keep or to recover his place in social group.

More over, he can recall the principal events of his own past. He can to some extent relive this past, even when he does not succeed in conveying to others a sufficiently detailed idea of it. Hence a whole part of his memory – the part which retains events and remembers persons – keeps contact with the collective memory and is under its control. He tries to be understood by others and to understand them- like a man in foreign country who does not speak the language but knows the history of this country and has not forgotten his own history. But he lacks a large number of current notions. A word heard or read by him is not accompanied by the feeling that he understands it sense; images of objects pass before his eyes without his being able to attach a name to them-to recognize their nature and role, Under certain circumstances he can no longer identify his thought with that of others or attain that form of social representation which is exemplified by a notion, a scheme or a symbols of a gesture or of a thing. Contact between his thought and the collection memory becomes interrupted at a certain number of detailed points.
Memory and aphasia