Collective memory implies the social and psychological production of meaningful acts of memory, a special kind of truth claim about a controversial past. Memory acts are thus conceptualized as ideological positioning movements toward others, which is impossible to account for from individual cognition. What kind of psychological processes, if any, would be involved in collective memory? A three-fold model is sketched to account for a whole act of memory. One analytical component is the generation of a knowledge structure about the past object. A second component is the construction of an attitude toward the theme. The third is the understanding of the ideological dimension within which the knowledge structure and the attitude under production are contextualized. An information storage-and-retrieval mechanism is not needed in this theoretical account. It is suggested that psychology of memory may contribute to accounting for these three micro-genetic levels as integrated into meaningful memory acts.
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