This is so true.
Psychiatrists are now prescribing patients "no memory" drugs in extreme cases where the memory of a traumatic incident haunts the patient.
In my own case I found it very useful to forget I was married when I went out of town.
"...most decent people still endorse George Santayana’s celebrated dictum: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The consequence of this is that remembrance as a species of morality has become one of the more unassailable pieties of the age. Today, most societies all but venerate the imperative to remember. We have been taught to believe that the remembering of the past and its corollary, the memorialising of collective historical memory, has become one of humanity’s highest moral obligations.
"But what if this is wrong, if not always, then at least part of the time? What if collective historical memory, as it is actually employed by communities and nations, has led far too often to war rather than peace, to rancour and resentment rather than reconciliation, and the determination to exact revenge for injuries both real and imagined, rather than to commit to the hard work of forgiveness?
...
"But at least let there be no turning a blind eye to the high price societies have paid and are continuing to pay for the solace of remembrance.
...
"I am not prescribing moral amnesia here. To be wholly without memory would be to be without a world. Nor am I arguing against the determination for a group to memorialise its dead or demand acknowledgment of its sufferings. To do so would be to counsel a kind of moral and psychological self-mutilation of tragic proportions. On the other hand, too much forgetting is hardly the only risk. There is also too much remembering...
...
"Hyperthymesia is a rare medical condition that has been defined as being marked by “unusual autobiographical remembering”. The medical journal Neurocase: The Neural Basis of Cognition identifies its two main characteristics: first that a person spends “an abnormally large amount of time thinking about his or her personal past”, and second that the person “has an extraordinary capacity to recall specific events from [his or her] personal past”.
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/mar/02/cult-of-memory-when-history-does-more-harm-than-good
Psychiatrists are now prescribing patients "no memory" drugs in extreme cases where the memory of a traumatic incident haunts the patient.
In my own case I found it very useful to forget I was married when I went out of town.
"...most decent people still endorse George Santayana’s celebrated dictum: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The consequence of this is that remembrance as a species of morality has become one of the more unassailable pieties of the age. Today, most societies all but venerate the imperative to remember. We have been taught to believe that the remembering of the past and its corollary, the memorialising of collective historical memory, has become one of humanity’s highest moral obligations.
"But what if this is wrong, if not always, then at least part of the time? What if collective historical memory, as it is actually employed by communities and nations, has led far too often to war rather than peace, to rancour and resentment rather than reconciliation, and the determination to exact revenge for injuries both real and imagined, rather than to commit to the hard work of forgiveness?
...
"But at least let there be no turning a blind eye to the high price societies have paid and are continuing to pay for the solace of remembrance.
...
"I am not prescribing moral amnesia here. To be wholly without memory would be to be without a world. Nor am I arguing against the determination for a group to memorialise its dead or demand acknowledgment of its sufferings. To do so would be to counsel a kind of moral and psychological self-mutilation of tragic proportions. On the other hand, too much forgetting is hardly the only risk. There is also too much remembering...
...
"Hyperthymesia is a rare medical condition that has been defined as being marked by “unusual autobiographical remembering”. The medical journal Neurocase: The Neural Basis of Cognition identifies its two main characteristics: first that a person spends “an abnormally large amount of time thinking about his or her personal past”, and second that the person “has an extraordinary capacity to recall specific events from [his or her] personal past”.
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/mar/02/cult-of-memory-when-history-does-more-harm-than-good
