Educational articles

Eugenijus Žmuida / Photo by R. Verseckaitė

The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs* claimed that memory is only possible within society. A wild human or an animal has no memory. If a feral child raised in the jungle learned to speak, they would not be able to recount anything—neither what happened nor what adventures they experienced - because they would not have developed memory.

So how is memory developed?

We cultivate it unintentionally, for example, by asking a small child whether they liked being at their grandmother’s house, what they ate there. When we take a child to a movie, we ask what they saw, what adventures took place. A child’s brain is always focused on the future—they’re only interested in what’s going to happen: what gifts they’ll receive, who will come... They don’t want to recall the past. But through such playful interactions, the child is made to look back, to think, to remember. At first, they resist, but eventually, a time comes when they begin to tell stories themselves. That means their memory has developed. In this way, we gradually build memory - and don’t even realize how much time we spend living in it. Each of us.

Now that we’re adults, we can notice that our spiritual, inner life is a life within memory. We eagerly return to our childhood - a time no one else can experience the way we did - and often, we can’t or don’t even want to share it. (...) People who are important to us settle in our memory, and we hold onto that as a treasure, as an ontological foundation. Just as a nation has its myths, each of us has our personal myths - of childhood, first love, and more. And we need them, because “I am precisely what I remember.” We all know the saying, “I think, therefore I am.” When speaking about memory, we could say: “I remember, therefore I am.”

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* Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) – French sociologist and social psychologist.