MEMORY AS RECONSTRUCTION

Two independent lines of evidence converge on the same claim, sixty years apart. Frederic Bartlett (Remembering, 1932) showed experimentally that recall is not retrieval of a fixed trace but active reconstruction shaped by present schemas ('effort after meaning') — memory as narrative reassembly, not replay. Karim Nader, Glenn Schafe & Joseph LeDoux (2000, Nature 406:722–726) gave this a molecular mechanism: a consolidated fear memory, once reactivated, briefly re-enters a labile, protein-synthesis-dependent state before being re-stored — 'reconsolidation.' Each act of remembering is, neurobiologically, an act of rewriting; a memory recalled today is fused with everything that has happened since it was last recalled. --> Directly supports Despina Zacharopoulou's rejection of Freud's mourning/melancholia model (a fixed, primary loss to be excavated) in favour of trauma as 'corporeal trace' (Spinoza 1996, 44) or 'phantasm'.