Unremembered: Memorial, Sentimentality, Dislocation

The focus here will be on understanding the ‘psycho-social’ function of collective memory, by which we refer simply to any phenomenon in which social factors impact on an individual’s thoughts or behaviour. The term ‘collective memory’ raises questions about the extent to which the tendency to memorialise within social fields involves collective un-remembering. I use the term to capture a crucial distinction: between the individual who has a mind of her own and a society that impacts on that mind from without. This distinction presents a challenge to any study of mass phenomena, such as, for example, the socially significant meanings attached to war memorials. Psychologists and psychoanalysts have a well-developed set of explanations for how individuals form meaningful attachments to objects,1 but explanations about collective formations falter when they revert to concepts drawn from individual psychology. As Paul Ricœur points out in Memory, History, Forgetting, by the end of the twentieth century, for sociologists at least, ‘collective consciousness is … one of those realities whose ontological status is not in question’ (Ricœur 2004, p. 95). Even with this pronouncement, Ricœur is reluctant to draw the psychological field into play in explanations of the social.