Az emlékezés és a felejtés dinamikája

Absztrakt

Through the study of a life story, the essay presents remembering and forgetting mechanisms that have developed and operated back-to-back throughout the years, seemingly inseparable from one another for an outsider. The analysis concentrates on how and what individuals narrate – those who have processed their trauma and those who have not. The study is based on interviews (a biographical and several other structured ones), as well as archival sources and a documentary. The life story of the individual presented in this essay is characterised by a mixture of personal trauma and historical trauma, and an intertwining of remembering with forgetting—in this case more involuntary repression than reparative oblivion. It demonstrates that the ideal processes of forgetting and remembering, as described by Plato and Aristotle, tend to be irrevocably entangled in real life.