Owning discoveries of other’s past: A psychological approach

Abstract

This detailed analysis of a fragment of an interview with a Belgian woman about her father’s World War II experiences raises questions about the nature of memory. In the interview, the woman discusses the snippets she knows about her father’s past to construct a narrative about this past. In doing so, she is torn between building a narrative that corresponds to her father’s actual war experience, which remains underspecified, and a coherent narrative, a challenge given the paucity of information she has. The nature of her (re)constructive process speaks to critical questions about the nature of memory—Is it confined to one’s personal past? Does its (re)constructive nature make it less about the retrieval and more about the product of the (re)construction? Is it something that one owns? Or is a held also by all those who assisted in the (re)construction? Answers to these questions challenges many long-standing beliefs about memory.