Amnesia

“ It is one of the suggestions which most promptly succeed, even with quite fresh ones. A systematized amnesia of certain periods of one's life may also be suggested, the subject placed, for instance, where he was a decade ago with the intervening years obliterated from his mind. ”

“ Her lips were parted and her fists closed a little as she waited.
"About your having amnesia, you know."
Her hand went to her heart.
"I only mention it," I said, "because I don't want to take advantage of any ignorance you may have concerning my position—and what I do know. If you have forgotten possibly, I think I ought to tell you, for I can't pretend to be on the island when I am not. It seems to me that quite in spite of myself I've got off it. ”

“ Despite the extensive amnesia in many cases of double consciousness, the patients’ behaviour does not correspond to the degree of their ignorance, but it seems rather as if a deeper instinct guided their actions in accordance with their former knowledge. Not only this relatively slight amnesic dissociation, but the severe amnesia of the epileptic twilight-state, formerly regarded as irreparabile damnum, does not suffice to cut the inmost threads which bind the ego-complex in the twilightstate to the normal ego. ”

“ We find numerous examples of the loss of altruistic, moral, or religious feelings, of partial or total indifference to the past, of complete insensibility—the Gemütslosigkeit of the German alienists.
I confine myself to the consideration of affective amnesia under its simplest and most widely-known form. Nothing is more frequently met with. In the first place, the single fact that most psychologists either neglect or deny the phenomenon of emotional memory, constitutes a presumption that its function is not a very obvious one. ”

“ I believe that the infantile amnesia which causes the individual to look upon his childhood as if it were a prehistoric time and conceals from him the beginning of his own sexual life—that this amnesia is responsible for the fact that one does not usually attribute any value to the infantile period in the development of the sexual life. One single observer cannot fill the gap which has been thus produced in our knowledge. ”

“ Amnesia alone, however, does not constitute alteration of personality strictly speaking; for a person may have complete loss of memory for certain specific experiences without true alteration of character. It is of important significance, as we shall see, that the dissociated or inhibited [265] systems may include emotions, instincts and innate dispositions.
548Examination of recorded cases shows too that besides mental memories, physiological functions may be involved in the dissociation. ”

“ The amnesia may be incomplete, a sort of dysmnesia, or twilight memory, but as a rule, the amnesia is lacunar. The toxic and infectious amnestic confusions have a loss of memory for events following the onset, but these war cases of amnestic confusion have the loss of memory running back far into the patient’s past, slipping from the mind his name, his parentage, age, and vocation. Instead of being like the toxic confusional amnesia, an anterograde amnesia of fixation, the Shell-shock amnesia is apt to be antero-retrograde. ”

“ These antero-retrograde amnesias, whether due to emotion or to [638] strong physical shock, may sometimes leave in sharp relief the recollection of the shock or event itself which initiated the amnesia. Meanwhile the patient does not forget automatic actions of dressing, reading, writing, and the like. The amnesia may be very selective, imitating aphasia, word blindness, letter blindness, agraphia, and the like. All this is part of the hallucinatory form of mental confusion which Régis describes as oniric delirium (see for oniric delirium, discussion under Case 333) . ”

“ As we have seen, from the fact that something outside of the personal consciousness can manifest memory of a given experience at the very same moment when the personal consciousness has amnesia for that experience, we are compelled to infer that conservation must be by a medium, psychological or physiological, capable of being excited as a specific secondary process. ”

“ The young wife of the friend whom I had reminded of the animality of the unconscious was also among those present, and I was perforce reminded that she was not at all prepared for the reception of such unsympathetic views. The forgetting spared me a number of unpleasant questions from her and a hopeless discussion, and just that must have been the motive of the ‘temporary amnesia.’
“It is interesting to note that as a concealing thought there emerged a sentence in which the deity is degraded to a human invention, while in the sought-for sentence there was an allusion to the animal in the man. ”

“ During the attack itself she is generally isolated from the external world; she does not notice what is going on around her, does not know that she is talking loudly, etc. But she has no amnesia for the dream-content of her attack. Amnesia for her motor expressions and for the changes in her surroundings is not always present. That this is dependent upon the degree of intensity of her somnambulic state and that there is sometimes partial paralysis of individual sense organs, is proved by the occasion when she did not notice me ”

“ ANSWER: It's the truth, and all I can say. Partial amnesia.
QUESTION: Do you have any idea how many professional criminals try that amnesia thing? Everything went black—yeah. You're not a professional criminal, you're a very intelligent girl. How do you think that amnesia stuff is going to sound in court?
ANSWER: Bad.
QUESTION: Well? Don't you care?
ANSWER: I can't invent for you. I don't know. I can't remember.
QUESTION: All right. Mrs. Doherty was upset by what you'd been saying. ”

“ Amnesia's an adaptive reaction to inner conflict, a sort of hysterical inhibition. When the inhibition's released by the Egrisanto technique, under deep analysis, ordinarily the block to memory goes with it, and recall returns." Nelva ran a slim forefinger along the edge of her papers; eyed Dane. ”

“ Where the hysterical dissociation becomes so extreme as to eventuate in amnesia in one state for another the different systems of complexes are easily recognized as so many phases of multiple personality. ”

“ Granted, however, that a weak state of consciousness is something definite, that by it is meant to indicate confusion, indistinctness of consciousness, and granted furthermore, that such a state leaves no memory behind, how then shall we explain amnesia of mental states when consciousness was intense, clear and distinct, as in the case of hypnosis or of artificial somnambulism? ”

“ We may, in fact, lay it down as a general law that during any dissociated state, no matter how extensive or how intense the amnesia, all the experiences that can be recalled in any other state, whether the normal one or another dissociated state, are conserved and, theoretically at least, can be made to manifest themselves. ”

“ A man suffering from amnesia has, upon his return to normal, no recollection of what happened while he was in that condition. While I do not say that I was amnestic in every sense of the word, yet my condition must have resembled that peculiar malady to a certain degree. I can positively state that I have absolutely no remembrance of the events which are described below. Yet they are in my own handwriting in my diary. My own idea of the subject is that I was in a sort of twilight sleep, as it were—not completely under Lessman’s influence, yet partly so. ”

“ Amnesia—or, more properly speaking, dulness of perception and feebleness of retention of residua—occurs as a strictly congenital condition from imperfect cerebral development, or a little later in life from infantile diseases, constituting one of the aspects of idiocy. ”

“ Subconscious traumatic memories.—When an emotional complex has once been organized by an emotional trauma and more or less dissociated from the personality by the conflicting emotional impulses, it is conserved as a neurogram more or less isolated. The fact of amnesia for the experience is evidence of its isolation in that it cannot be awakened and synthesized with the personal consciousness. Now, given such an isolated neurogram, observation shows that it may be excited to autonomous subconscious activity by associative stimuli of one kind or another. ”

“ S. L. Golfin, and an address on Wabash, Chicago.
"The phenomenon of amnesia interested me," he went on. "A person suddenly can't remember anything. Perhaps years later memory returns, but there is a gap. Why?"
He smiled at me triumphantly. Sarah Fish nodded sagely.
"Because...." Golfin lifted his left arm with a flourish and inspected his watch. "One hour and three minutes," he said quietly. Then, "That was the question I asked myself. Why? Unfortunately amnesia is rather rare. ”

“ Re amnesia and Shell-shock, Roussy and Lhermitte speak of amnesia as ordinarily a phenomenon of confusion. Amongst the mental disorders of the Shell-shock psychoses, these authors describe a group due to inhibition or diminution of mental activity, including the rare narcolepsy, or pathological sleep, and the confusional states proper. Simple confusion involves slowness in thinking, and amnesia often anterograde from the moment of the shock. ”

“ Herman took a deep breath and said nothing.
"You may call me Secundus, if you like," resumed the Person, "and this gentleman Primus, since it is with him that you will have principally to deal. Now, our problem here is one of amnesia, and I will confess to you frankly that we ourselves are totally inadequate to cope with it. In theory, we are not subject to disorders of the mind, and that's what makes us so vulnerable now that it has happened. ”

“ Owing to the precise organization of the consciousness into two distinct personalities it was possible to definitely determine beyond question the antagonistic ideas of one personality which voluntarily induced the conflict and, by the impulsive force of their emotion, caused the amnesia in the other personality. ”

“ There will correspondingly be at least three forms of amnesia or forgetfulness, amnesia of registration, amnesia of reproduction, and amnesia of recognition. The real problem of Psychology is not so much the lapses of memory, but the why and how of memory, and especially of recognitive memory. ”

“ These differences serve as the basis of a complicated subdivision of amnesia which it is not necessary to fully reproduce here.
Temporary partial amnesia is a variety which is frequently observed in normal persons, even the most gifted. A word or fact escapes us, seems wholly lost for a few minutes, hours, or days; the more we strive to recall it, the less we succeed ”

“ Most of the experiences and impulses prior to the latent period then fall victim to the infantile amnesia, the forgetting we have already discussed, which cloaks our earliest childhood and makes us strangers to it. In every psychoanalysis we are confronted with the task of leading this forgotten period of life back into memory; one cannot resist the supposition that the beginning of sexual life it contains furnishes the motive for this forgetting, namely, that this forgetting is a result of suppression. ”

“ Let us suppose that A forgets the ten previous years of his life—the result of a fall or nervous crisis. This amnesia will perhaps last for six months, during which period he will believe himself to have returned to the age of fifteen, when he is really twenty-five. ”

“ The perceptions which precipitated the attack may have been entirely subconscious and yet may be brought back to memory. With the pathogenesis of the attacks we are not now directly concerned. The point of interest for us lies in the fact that such forgotten casual ideas and perceptions, some of which had been actually subconscious and some had only entered the margin of the focus of attention may, notwithstanding the amnesia, be conserved; and the same is true of any succession of trivial ideas occurring at an inconsequential moment in a person’s life. ”

“ My human birth—"
A crash when she landed. A brain concussion. And it had stricken her with amnesia—all her memory gone so that at that instant when she regained consciousness her life in effect was beginning again. ”

“ You have heard that it is possible to express the object of psychoanalytic treatment in a formula: all pathogenic unconscious experience must be transposed into consciousness. You will perhaps be surprised to learn that this formula can be replaced by another: all the memory gaps of the patient must be filled out, his amnesias must be abolished. Practically this amounts to the same thing. Therefore an important role in the development of his symptoms must be accredited to the amnesias of the neurotic. The analysis of our first case, however, will hardly justify this valuation of the amnesia. ”

“ If it could not directly overcome the impulses of the conscious process it might circumvent the latter by inducing mental and physiological disturbances which would indirectly prevent the conscious impulses from fulfilling their aim; e. g., inhibition of the will, dissociation or total inhibition of consciousnessconsciousness, amnesia for particular memories, motor phenomena interfering with normal activity, etc. The subconscious sentiment engaging in such a conflict could be excited to activity by any associative antagonistic idea in consciousness. ”

“ The drunkard and the glutton will not repeat their excesses as long as the impression of the after-effects remains vivid. The educator, as every one knows, has no hold over a child on whom the recollection of rewards and punishments has no effect. I have already mentioned the state of mind which frequently succeeds dangerous confinements; this, again, is a case of affective amnesia. The absence of sympathy, in many men, is only an incapacity for reviving the recollection of the ills they have suffered themselves, and consequently for feeling them in others. ”