Freud and Nietzsche - an Account for the Role of Memory in Our Lives

Judith Butler speaks of the reasons for people to mourn; she states that each person associates themselves to others. Through this association, people become part of a theoretical unit, as Butler refers to it, a “we”. It is because of this “we” that through losing another you are by association losing part of yourself. Butler speaks of mourning as the acceptance that one will change due to this loss, perhaps on an indefinite

Memory is a powerful concept. Often when an individual undergoes a traumatic situation, the ramifications of these actions seep into an individualfs psyche unknowingly. In effect this passes through memory and becomes sub-consciously buried within a personfs behavioural patterns generally. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink explores the concept of a young mans subconscious desire for a woman whom he gcanft remember to forgeth (1Memento) as she is so deeply inlaid within his soul.

The importance of continuing the bond between the bereaved individual and the deceased is another prominent aspect of current grief theories (Corr & Coolican, 2010). Past theories emphasized letting go of the bereaved individual; however, current theories suggest continuing the bond allows bereaved individuals to learn how to live with the loss of their loved one. Klass et al. (1996) stressed the importance of continuing bonds for parents who have lost a child and allowing parents to continue their relationship with their child past his/her death. This allows the parents to reconstruct their identity and integrate the loss into their lives without severing the relationship they held so close to their heart (Klass, 1996).

Death is a universally experienced phenomenon. In the United States alone, over 2.6 million people die each year (Center for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2015). For practitioners, it is of utmost importance to better understand the process of grief to develop better interventions for bereaved individuals.

The past, For Nietzsche, has to be forgotten because it upsets the peace of a future moment.

A historical example that I believe applies to Nietzsche’s quotes is the Civil Rights Movement, particularly Rosa Parks. Parks was an African-American women, who, at the time, did not have the same rights as white people due to the color of her skin. In 1955, due to the whites-only section being filled on a bus, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the colored section to a white person. Parks was arrested for these actions, as were a few others who took the same actions. Due to this historical event, Parks was motivated to bring change to people of color and she eventually joined forces with Martin Luther King Jr. in

The whole debate of “repressed memories” was started by Sigmund Freud in the late nineteenth/twentieth century. Dictionary.com defines the word repression as the unconscious rejection from painful compulsions, and/ or fear from the conscious mind. One of Freud clinical cases lead him to come up with the idea to try to get rid of anger and other emotions presented by patients that suffered from “repressed memories/thoughts” and bring them into consciousness.

The loss of a loved one is a very crucial time where an individual can experience depression, somatic symptoms, grief, and sadness. What will be discussed throughout this paper is what the bereavement role is and its duration, as well as the definition of disenfranchised grief and who experiences this type of grief. I will also touch upon the four tasks of mourning and how each bereaved individual must accomplish all four tasks before mourning can be finalized. Lastly, with each of these topics, nursing implications will be outlined on how to care for bereaved individuals and their families.

German and European Historian Alon Confino analysis the influence and issues that collective memory has within its predominant field of cultural history. Confino defines the term “memory” as “the ways in which a people construct a sense of the past.” In his introduction, he lays out a brief outline of his thesis, which is not to offer alternatives to “doing” memory, rather offer a new direction in the field. This new direction is to establish a way that memory can be used to build new connections between the representation and social experiences. In doing this, the author constructs his article focusing on three points, that he feels the main issues with the methods and theory of memory. Confino’s points revolve around the connection between

This essay explores several models and theories that discuss the complexities of loss and grief. A discussion of the tasks, reactions and understanding of grief through the different stages from infants to the elderly, will also be attempted.

He looks back at the amazing lives of the past and feels part of that great history. He inherits the virtues of the past; he is tradition embodied. Nietzsche says the most valued type of the antiquarian way of doing history is the one who reveres the modest past and the simple life. That problem is that when one admires and tries to preserve the past, the antiquarian is looking back on the past with rose colored lenses because of a “restricted field of vision” (8). Also, the antiquarian “assigns to the things of the past no difference in value and proportion which would distinguish things form each other fairly. Nietzsche claims the antiquarian may know how to preserve life, but she certainly doesn’t know how to generate life, as she always undervalues what is emergent. It paralyzes the present with reluctance to replace the old with the new (9). We create a second nature of ourselves and in doing so, we come to realize that “first nature was at one time or another once the second nature and that every victorious second nature becomes a first nature” (9). In other words, if I am interpreting this correctly, by being critical of the past, by widening our historical glance to find the “bad” as well as the “good,” which is our second nature, being critical will be the first nature of the next generation. We pass on the habit of critique rather than blind antiquarian

On an internal level, experiencing sorrow can help you to become a better person- it helps you to lend a helping hand to those who suffer and is an instrument to help comfort them. It can be used as a tool to help you to understand and love others and therefore be a better person yourself. Those who mourn are united with God in their sorrow. Externally, you can help to make a difference in the world with sorrow. Mourning not only helps you to understand others and their grief, but it also helps you to recognize mourning in others. Even if your life situations are not the same of they are worse off than you, you are still able to connect with the poor, abused, hungry, discriminated against, and victims of crime. This is why mourning is a

Nietzsche approaches history as monumental, which is examining the past to inspire greatness for present and future actions. Monumental history examines the past to use it as a teacher or model for future greatness. The monumental history is concerned with the greatest moments in history of humanity and uses it as leverage to emulate or surpass those historical moments. This kind of history attempts to emulate the greatness of the past but Nietzsche is skeptical of this idea by

The world is a representation that our bodies and our minds construct within ourselves to represent the outside world. In other words, human perception of the world is subjective to the individual. We pick and choose the experiences that we want to remember and how we want to remember them while we unconsciously forget the majority of our life experiences. We see and acknowledge what we want to see and ignore what we think is not related to us. The way we see, understand and interpret the outside world is structured by what we know and what we believe which also goes back to our cultures and our environment, which is an individual’s history. For us, to be aware of our surrounding and the moment in history that we are living we have memory. Memory is an illustration of the past, it’s our subjective and objective perception of the past. Both, our conscious and unconscious memory plays a vital role on an individual identity. Memory and history will always be intertwined, memory and history are not set in stones and are always changing due to the fact that we as human beings are always changing and moving through time and space. Memory and forgetting also goes in hand in hand. Most of our memories are unconscious, we do not remember everything that happens in our lives, we forget the rest. Human memories reflect the society and the the historical time period they live in. Millions of people are unware of their history, many tries to find and lean about their history while

Our human condition is defined by mortality, contingency, and discontentment. This reality combined with the new outlooks of relationships between our lives and the objects that surround us in our world, have caused authors in the twentieth century to question traditional Western thought. In Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust extends these comparisons to include one's use of memory and