Presenting the Past

Psychology is the dogma of our age; psychotherapy is our means of self-understanding; and "repressed memory" is now a universally familiar form of trauma. Jeffrey Prager, who is both a sociologist and a psychoanalyst, explores the degree to which we manifest the clichés of our culture in our most private recollections. At the core of Presenting the Past is the dramatic and troubling case of a woman who during the course of her analysis began to recall scenes of her own childhood sexual abuse. Later the patient came to believe that the trauma she remembered as a physical violation might have been an emotional violation and that she had composed a memory out of present and past relationships. But what was accurate and true? And what evidence could be persuasive and valuable? Could the analyst trust either her convictions or his own? Using this case and others, Prager explores the nature of memory and its relation to the interpersonal, therapeutic, and cultural worlds in which remembering occurs.Synthesizing research from social science, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology, Prager uses clinical examples to argue more generally that our memories are never simple records of events, but constantly evolving constructions, affected by contemporary culture as well as by our own private lives. He demonstrates the need that sociology has for the insights of psychoanalysis, and the need that psychoanalysis has for the insights of sociology.

In his thought-provoking Presenting the Past, Jeffrey Prager examines the phenomena of recovered memory and the influences of therapy. Interweaving his theoretical stance with a single case study, he describes his work as 'a psychoanalytic treatment to explore the complicated relation between the individual and the collective, and the ways in which the cultural interpenetrates the most individual of pursuits, memory and self-constitution'...Prager skilfully moves the reader from the therapeutic setting to the wider social context and back again, allowing us insight into [his patient's] experience from two perspectives, her relationships with family and her therapist, and the influence of the culture in which she was living., It is often referred to as the Tolstoy question. Do great men help to create zeitgeist, or are they simply its pawns?...Prager has written an engaging contribution to the vast literature on this topic which is particularly valuable because it focuses on memory. People often forget that memory, too, is part of the self and therefore one of the proper subjects for 'Tolstoy' debate., Prager's Presenting the Past is an extraordinarily ambitious project, one that is constructed and checked by the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and sociology. Confronting head-on the recent culture wars, and in particular debates about the veracity of traumatic memories, Presenting the Past is at the same time personal and philosophical, intersubjective and cultural, psychodynamic and sociological. Prager displays a formidable command of recent research in sociology, social theory, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and neuroscience, and a powerful vision of how such discourses can be synthesized to place the constitution of memory in relation to the intrapsychic, interpersonal, and cultural worlds in which it occurs. To sustain the vision, while emphasizing throughout the dialectical relationship between the psyche and society, is an impressive achievement...Prager's analytical narrative is captivating throughout. This is advanced psychoanalytic social theory at its finest, capturing--through a detailed case study--the complex relation between psyche and society, memory and history, the personal and the political, intersubjectivity and culture. Prager's Presenting the Past offers a first-rate social theory of memory., In this compelling book, Jeffrey Prager has created a sociology of memory, showing how memory is situated in interpersonal contexts, and draws from cultural tropes. At the same time, he challenges the social sciences to open their epistemological and methodological doors to case studies of individuals and to recognize that subjectivity is personally created rather than socially or culturally determined. Psychoanalysis, he documents, takes us well beyond the experientially and interpretively thin sociological subject., [This book] presents a thoughtful and at times provocative analysis of social and subjective aspects of remembering. The book is a serious, careful, and scholarly attempt to shift the emphasis in memory theory from the individual mind/brain to the social contexts in which remembering occurs in everyday life. Drawing on his dual backgrounds in psychoanalysis and sociology, Prager is able to put together an analysis that contains unique and sometimes revealing perspectives concerning the process of remembering.

Jeffrey Prager is Professor of Sociology at UCLA and a member of the faculty of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute.