Remembering and Creating Memories by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

March 2022

    A friend of mine remembers when he was a little child, his mother talking about the croaking frog they were hearing that morning and then being taken outside to look at it. It was huge, gigantic, massive, the size of a small elephant.

     I remember a Zeppelin airship flying over our house, even though they ceased to fly decades before I was born and they didn’t fly in Australia at all.

   Someone I know has an apparent memory of having sex with his mother. Maybe this actually happened, or maybe it didn’t. Gathering the evidence around such a memory requires much more than relying on a memory reconstruction. It requires close examination of the behaviour of actual people and circumstances and possible situations. Again, maybe it happened, but maybe it didn’t. What is important here is knowing that memory is not to be relied upon as a complete and authentic record of past possible events.

   Memory is not a useful tool for determining actual history and so any technique for digging out possible memories can’t be relied upon as the sole means of determining truth – which is why I refuse to pretend to do any so called repressed memory work using hypnosis. I do not want to participate in the making of  false memories. It is significant that hypnosis came into disrepute over this very thing. Once upon a time hypnosis was used to “prove” the authenticity of an event and used in a court of law as evidence. This was until sufficient research had been done to discredit the supposed revelation of repressed memories through this method, unfortunately dragging down with it, the whole reputation of hypnosis as useful adjunct in psychotherapy. Very fortunately, hypnotherapy is returning to being recognized as useful in psychotherapy for other purposes, and not as an excavator of the past.

     We are creating memories all the time in an attempt to make sense of our life. Memories, as I’ve said already, are not necessarily a record of past situations. Sometimes they are a way to explain things that are poorly comprehended in the first place. A little child sees things, as all little beings do, from a small person’s perspective. They are little in a big world. Grasping at meaning from a perspective that is really limited requires piecing together bits of information from around them. Some of these bits of information could be things half heard and barely understood (like the story of the frog), things seen in books and on screen, some could come from other experiences, and so on. My apparent Zeppelin sighting I realize now came from a book on dirigibles and balloons that my father used to read to us melded into recurring dreams I had and reconstituted as an actual event. The situation of being little, of course, is actually true for all of us as we endeavour to negotiate the complexities of the vast world we live in. At least, though, we adults are generally better able to sort out what is probable and what isn’t – although maybe I’m too optimistic here, given the extraordinary rise in conspiracy theories.

      The less information we have, the less we have to test the authenticity of something and the more likely we are to incorporate the flimsily known into what we think we know, creating a world view replete with false memories. This is essentially the way cults operate: the known world is deliberately limited to a tight and restrictive community. Before long, the most vulnerable among the group start remembering abuses that may, or may not, have actually occurred and so cling to the group more and more.

    Everything needs to be tested. Nothing should be believed simply because someone has said if you remember it, that it happened. Maybe it did; maybe it didn’t. A memory can be changed, rethought, examined, played with, measured with the feeling status of things, but not relied upon to be necessarily a strict re-membering (re-putting together) of the past. Gather as much information you can and test your memory. In the end, though, maybe your reconstruction is real, but maybe it isn’t.

Returning and Re-membering by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

February 2014

 

     Snow drifted up, sideways, down, through bare birch branches, drifted to ground, thickening there. An explosion of seagulls burst upwards,  a fountain of birds: an indelible evocative sight, numinous really. 

     This is the landscape of the park opposite the Soviet built flats in which my aunt and uncle live in Tallinn, Estonia. This could have been the landscape of my mother’s early life. This could have been the landscape … but for the location. My mother was born in Pskov in Russia, of Estonian father and Russian mother. She was schooled in St Petersberg, Russia and then Tartu, not Tallinn, and then only a short time. My mother  and her brother came to Australia on a ship in the mid-1920s. They were immigrants, boat people. 

     It was Australia Day recently: when Australians celebrate with the welcoming of new Australians and the drinking of beer and explosions of fireworks. My heart was heavy and the Ozzie Ozzie Ozzie refrain just left me cold. I had only been back a week from Estonia, this land of my mother’s.  The memories and rememberings somehow didn’t sit well in barbecues, and so I stayed at home.

     Re-membering, note the way I write it, is the putting together of things half imagined, half  recalled. Re-membering joins the dots. The story, my story, is situated and relational. This story is situated in place and it is relational to circumstance, place, time, people and the teller herself. This story of my mother, and thus me – to a degree – starts in 1909 with her birth into a disputed land. Of interest to everyone, wedged between the Baltic Sea to the north and west, Latvia to the South and Russia to the East, Finland, across the bay, and Sweden, over the Baltic to the North-West; sometimes claimed by Germans, sometimes Finns, the Russians, the Swedes; Estonia, of interest because of her precious port in  the capital, Tallinn. This port is remarkable. It doesn’t freeze over, because of warm currents. It opens frozen northern Europe to the world. So this little country, with its rich cultural history, its opera, ballet, and theatre companies, its artistic and musical history, its unique language (related not to Russian, but to Finnish and Hungarian), is attractive to larger countries that want to expand their borders. In 1909, Estonia was annexed by Russia. She gained a short lived independence in 1918, but soon she was gobbled again, this time into the Soviet regime, gaining independence again in 1989. Now she is dirt poor and propped up by the economy of Sweden (a dominance of another kind). She is poor but not down and out, despite a minuscule population of only 1.42 million people and a workforce that moves beyond her boundaries into Scandinavia.

     I am always interested in clear boundaries and I now compare this with Estonia’s fight for independent and clear boundaries from others surrounding her. I feel keenly the pressing in of others desires and needs and I know – in my bones – the richness of my own space. As one of my friends describes me, I am Elizabeth of Estonia. I know  the sinews and bones, and the cries of the children, of an ancient land, as if they were my own. This  land, strewn with the moss and snow covered ice boulders of Finnish granite that twisted and turned and travelled across the frozen Baltic Sea, is unique. Granite is from the Finnish landscape; Estonia is all wetlands and sandstone – and so much of it unsettled countryside. I know  it in the very marrow of my bones, the presence of others and my own unique integrity. It is in this knowing  that the personal and the professional meld together, for this is my gift (received, lived, and given again). 

     I am, via my mother, a new Australian.  Via her, I know what I give and receive and give again, in my life and my therapeutic work. This being in me, this land of my mother’s ancestry, is me being Australian and me being present for the presence of others and present for myself. I don’t think I am all that different from others who cross the oceans to this place. 

      My story is like  snow flakes dropping, rising, drifting and bursts of birds in silent crofts of trees. My story is merely musing, really. A seeking for sense; a joining of the dots.