Science Fiction, Memory and Trauma
▻http://www.deletionscifi.org/episodes/episode-13/science-fiction-memory-trauma
Psychologists developed an extensive range of terms for the illnesses of memory from the 1870s onwards – amnesia, fugue, dissociation, repression, traumatic forgetting. This was a radical idea, that people could be made ill by their own memories. Sigmund Freud, famously defined a hysteric as someone ‘who suffered mainly from reminiscences’ in 1893 and proposed that the most powerful memories were often those that, paradoxically, we could not voluntarily remember. A fascination with multiple personalities – people who might have different identities with entirely separate memory chains – began around the same time. Popular culture, meanwhile, has since been awash with evil foreign medics and Mesmerists who might steal our memories away, hypnotise us or control us, particularly in lurid Gothic figures from Count Dracula via Fu Manchu to those evil Chinese Communists who trigger ‘the Manchurian candidate’.
Modern technological manipulation of memory, and thus the potential to rewrite our essential selves, has intensified in the digital revolution of the last thirty years. Now the language of random access memory, programming and re-programming, downloading and uploading, and viral corruption or memory hacking, has modelled our fantasies and anxieties about this new terrain of what it means to remember and forget in the contemporary era.