Written by Emma Stroker, Psychotherapist
Emma Stroker is a psychotherapist who found her path into this discipline through working with adults and children with learning differences. She studied psychology to Masters level to help develop her understanding of the difficulties people can face when suffering from disturbances in thought and emotion. As well as working in private practice, she is involved with governance and teaching.
‘Saturday, May 30th, 2020: 22:11 hours. Standing in an open field in Suffolk, England; the crescent moon is on the Western horizon, quite low in the sky. I watch what looks like two travelling stars pass under the moon, heading South-South-West. A SpaceX rocket is to follow the International Space Station in the sky. As I watch, I wonder if I will remember this, but my writing these words now is a way of remembering; of recording an event that otherwise might have gone unremembered.
Spacex is to dock with the Space Station up there in the sky. I, however, am down here on Earth and I think of what we are in the midst of here – a pandemic. No one seems to know what to do in response to the virus, and no one really knows what the virus that randomly kills some and spares others is really about. We are responding to the unknown. Meanwhile, a rocket blasts into space
I have always been interested in memory. I have a good memory. I grew up in a house full of history books. I hated learning history because I wondered just who had written these stories (that become memories) that had to be remembered. Dates, facts and figures, revolutions, evolutions, and my father’s interest in disused railways. He believed that railways utterly changed the world forever. His knowledge of 19th-century history gave him the evidence and the animus to try to prove this.
So, I did not want to study history, but I was still interested in memory and how it works. When studying Psychology, learning about memory was central; it is regarded as being the linchpin of perception. So I learned about how memory works (or doesn’t work). Different types of memory (sensory, short-term/working, long-term, reminiscence bump, collective, episodic, semantic, procedural, flashbulb, collective, and declarative) and processes (encoding, storage, and retrieval). In the same way that we categorise species, psychology could categorise memory.
Then there are memory experiments such as ‘The effects of caffeine consumption on short-term memory’ or word-recall tasks. This was all very interesting, but what taught me most were the years I spent working with adults with learning disabilities whose memories did not serve them well. One man I supported would do something and then be unable to remember anything about what he had just done. It was a question of talking with him and, somewhere within that conversation, finding some way to enable him to remember; this was often easier if an experience had been shared with him. Another person’s past was so present she could never create a memory. People did not ‘leave’ her – if she looked around her, they were only waiting to be ‘found’ again, sometimes right in front of her.
And then, training to be a therapist: what did I learn about memory? Many people are caught up in their memories, and much therapy concerns re-telling, maybe re-experiencing, these memories alongside another (the therapist). One of the things I grappled with was the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s idea that the therapist works in such a way that they come to a session ‘without memory or desire’. I can understand the desire – not wanting or expecting anything; but memory? Surely some people need to be remembered because they have never felt remembered? However, like all great ideas, this can become a method of treatment. One has to work without memory or desire. What does interest me more in the present moment is the memories that we create together.
I do not have enough distance from all that has happened in recent years to feel that I have a ‘memory’ yet, but I sense that my recollections about the beginning of lockdown reveal something more than ‘flashbulb’ memory; it is more of an embodied and sensual memory; also maybe a world memory. I am trying to work out what sort of memory this is and whether it is just mine, or whether people around me will have these memories too. I will describe a few recollections:
I was in the local library on the Sunday before lockdown. The librarian was very anxious and feeling unwell. I helped her shut up shop and ensured she could get home safely, giving her my number. It felt so different from how we normally are with each other in the world; it had an intensity to it; suddenly, we all had to help and support one another in a more committed and involved way.
I live in a village that has a large market square. Over the years, this space became more and more disused and empty. Now, on a Saturday morning, the place is bustling – cheese and pies, bread, jams, fish, and a farmer selling fruit and vegetables. I hope that this market coming to life does not become a memory. A little boy who lives in the flat above the chemist looks out of the window at the activity in the market square below. I wonder how much he will remember?
Nearby is a care home. The residents there have been ‘locked up’, but I have seen more or them and got to know them better throughout this period. Come rain or shine, they move their benches to the front of the building and welcome a chat from everyone passing by, as if in defiance of the authorities. I remember, when I worked in a care home, how the chairs would appear outside the front doors when the sun shone, and then I remember the brutal statistics that most deaths from COVID have occurred in care homes.
These are some of my memories but I arrived at them not just through remembering things and confining them to ‘the storehouse of our ideas’ (John Locke, philosopher). My memories seem to be more puzzling and enigmatic because they are imbued with my sense of the world in its volatile and unstable condition. I do not mean this in a ‘flashbulb memory’ sense – by flashbulb memory, I mean: ‘I remember what I was doing when such and such happened’ – rather, they are symptomatic of a feeling of change in the world and also my feeling of being ‘embedded’ in it, as the philosopher Merleau-Ponty claimed. Furthermore, am I ‘conserving’ or ‘constructing’ these experiences to become memories? (again, Merleau-Ponty).
What has taken me most by surprise is another type of memory which is not mine but was presented to me – the stories my parents told me about their childhood experiences of the Second World War. They are no longer here to think with me about what is going on in the world at present, so I draw on the experiences (memories) of the world they told me about. I can clearly remember my mother getting under the kitchen table during an air raid. Memories of her father who worked as a fireman down the pit – too physically frail to fight or be a miner, but still needed for the night shifts. Of my father’s mother suddenly decided to take her three children away from London. She managed to get herself evacuated with them. What would they all have to say about this? It seems that their memories have become more alive through what I am experiencing like joined up and shared memories of what happens during times of turmoil and crisis. So rather than being locked in the ‘storehouse’, along with other memories, I can see why these stories were so important – they were ways of making sense of extraordinary events that overturned lives.
The philosopher Heiddeger describes memory as ‘human thinking that recalls’ and where experience is ‘kept in safety’. Memory, in this sense, is a form of ‘keeping’; something which ‘harbours and conceals’ but can also be ‘thought-provoking’ (Heiddeger, 1972)
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I like the idea of ‘keeping’; that somehow, we become the keepers of the memories of others. This deepens the sense I have of world memory; that somehow memories of the past are all here now in this present moment of time.
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Emma Stroker, Psychotherapist
Emma Stroker is a psychotherapist who found her path into this discipline through working with adults and children with learning differences. She studied psychology to Masters level to help develop her understanding of the difficulties people can face when suffering from disturbances in thought and emotion. As well as working in private practice, she is involved with governance and teaching. Emma also uses her background in poetry and philosophy in her therapeutic practice and does not just rely on 'models of the mind' when faced with human suffering.
