Volume 1 / Athens 1999 Memory & History (Athens, June 1997) by Angelica Koufou A two day meeting organised by the Cultural and Intellectual History Society (CIHIS) was held in Athens in June 1997. The meeting explored the relationship of history and memory through three sessions devoted to the subjects of "Conceptions of Memory", "Places of Memory" and "History in the First Person". A fourth session was devoted to discussing the relationship of psychoanalysis to history. In the first session E. Gazi and A. Coufou discussed the evolution and modifications of the concept of memory in the Western tradition from mnemonics to counter-memory. E. Gazi argued that the art of mnemonics was not simply a memorising technique but a theory of knowing and interpreting the world which associated memory to knowledge. A. Coufou examined the origins of counter-memory and its role in undermining traditional concepts of historical knowledge. The paper presented Foucault's emphasis on discontinuities and ruptures which led him to challenge the canonical evolution in history, and sciences in general, and adopt a different conceptualisation which disrupts the relationship of history with memory as a homogeneous and linear unity. D. Kavoura argued that stored knowledge and memory (feelings, experiences, etc.) are used as mental tools of understanding historical events creating a continuity which corresponds to biological time. This process identifies social memory and memory-knowledge as two aspects of the same (cognitive) identity. A. Liakos foregrounded the significance of oblivion as a presupposition of history. Oblivion functions selectively in the formation of memory, as "an organised amnesia or amnesty'' which contributes to [political] stability. History as hermeneutics is also based on oblivion in its inability to reconstitute the past as a whole. The second session surveyed space and places as organising fields of memory. A. Chaniotis examined the construction of collective memory in the Hellenistic town. Using Greek inscriptions and passages from Plutarchus, he insisted that keywords not only formulated but dissolved collective memory and accentuated the role of religious sites in forging national memory. C. Gaganakis discussed the role of memory in the formation of the Protestant identity arguing that Protestantism used the press par excellence in order to forge a distinctly anti-Catholic religious identity. In this effort Protestants foregrounded French identity, juxtaposing it to Italian Catholicism, and developed a circular conception of time against the linear time established by the Catholics. A. Tzortzakis and I. Pentazou dealt with the role of the museum as locus of memory. A. Tzortzakis approached the evolution of museums through history focusing on the different conceptions which corresponded to different socio-cultural contexts. I. Pentazou analyzed the first exhibition of national souvenirs in modern Greece in 1884, and juxtaposed memory to reality by showing the permeability of the limits between past and present. This exhibition can also be seen as an attempt to manipulate living memory by constructing the representation of the Greek Revolution in a selective way. The third session was devoted to oral memory and autobiographies. A. Bountzouvi touched upon issues regarding oral memory, treating it as a form of memory in its own right, distinct from the written forms of memory. Focusing on oral tradition she also distinguished two streams in oral history corresponding to two different concepts of memory: the Freudian (memory-reservoir) and the active memory. The paper brought attention to the political dimension in the analysis of oral memory and the way it fashioned the diversity of individual identities. P. Handzaroula compared the autobiographies of D .Frazer and C. Steedman and examined the ways the personal and the collective are interwoven in the field of memory. As she claims, both Frazer and Steedman saw individual history as the site (locus) where other people's history is reflected and where social and political components converge. P. Voglis presented a similar view in his paper, which surveyed the memoirs of political prisoners in Greece. Voglis compared the autobiographies of political prisoners to traditional forms of autobiographies which follow the rules of bildungsroman and concluded that in the former the individual is subsumed in the collective as the individual "insignificant" experience is refracted through the collective experience. In the fourth session H. Karamanolakis attempted a psychoanalytical approach to memory, which A. Liakos commented upon, investigating the relationship between history and psychoanalysis. Underlining the healing role of memory in psychoanalysis, Karamanolakis argued that the emergence of repelled memory provoked by trauma leads to the rehabilitation of the patient but insisted that although re-emerged memory can be an invented one, its importance in individual personality should not be diminished. In this process oblivion also plays an important role, as it is sometimes necessary to remember in order to forget. Liakos discussed the relation of history to psychoanalysis and their similarities by comparing the structure of the dream to the structure of historiography. Although he juxtaposed the factual dimension of history to the interpretative dimension of psychoanalysis he pointed out that both historians and analysts reach knowledge through the fractures of narration. Yet, in spite of its contribution to intellectual history, psychoanalysis cannot be properly applied to history because of its lack of historicity and its solid emphasis on interpretation instead of truth. Return to Top