Memory: More Than Recall 131permission present in Western thought that the past could be manipulated,
erased, silenced, and re-written if the information it holds disturbs the
status quo. In particular it shows psychology’s willingness to embrace a
linear temporality in which the past is unknowable to all but those with
power. The women, despite the presence of their memories, were rendered
unable to know the difference between memory and fantasy. It was the
male psychoanalysts, with more social and political power, who got to
name memory as fantasy and ignore the need for individual and social
redress. “The knowledge of horrible events periodically intrudes into
public awareness but is rarely retained for long. Denial, repression, and
dissociation operate on a social as well as individual level” (Herman, 1997,
p. 2). Vallega’s (2014) reading of western temporality is not only an effort
towards diversifying concepts of time. It reveals the power inherent in
temporalities in particular how they reveal whom a society names as
capable of knowing the past and who is only capable of fantasy. Severing
memory into a past orientation also may sever responsibility for that past
disabling mechanisms for holding perpetrators accountable.
In more recent scholarship linear time is reflected in Western
psychology through the framework of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
(PTSD). PTSD positions a linear temporality as a natural function (even
though conceptions of temporality are deeply cultural), and it pathologizes
experiences of past memories erupting into the present (American
Psychiatric Association, 2013). Healthy memory orders trauma to the past
where it is less impactful and theorizes based only on individual memory
(American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Paul and Angela Lederach’s
(2010) work on trauma in nonwestern cultures revealed a temporality that
is simultaneous instead of linear. The experience of the past in the present
in these cultures serves as an indicator of a functional memory. Lederach
and Lederach (2010) reveal that linearity is not necessarily universal.
PTSD, as it is currently defined, also excludes trauma that can happen to a
collective and be ongoing and intergenerational like systemic racism
(Holmes, Facemire, & DaFonseca, 2016). Basing memory in an ahistorical
individual denies the experiences of structural violence that is often
contemporary as well as historical or simultaneously past-present.