Presenting the Past

Presenting the Past

The external world and the internal world have been one of the crucial topics in the psychological field. The past experience can affect the perception, point of view and the influence towards the present situation. No doubt, every people will precise a thing differently. If you haven’t experienced a traumatic event in your life, it’s hard for you to predict a big disaster is coming for you in the future. Or if you have experienced some unforgettable events in your childhood period of time, you will easily be portrayed some negative thinking and feeling towards your entire life. Memory will shift over-time due to the external and internal reasons. Prager has given out an analysis of Ms A to make an argument towards the memory depends on social interaction and can not be separate towards the entire world.

Prager’s idea towards the memory depends crucially on social interaction in various ways. In chapter 3 of presenting the past, Prager asserts that “remembering occurs not in the individual but intersubjectvely through the social environment in which the individual is embedded.” Almost all of the real-world activities involves interaction with others or are influenced by the presence and opinions of others in a social setting. In every social interaction, our minds develop a mental model with which we understand the people around us. Memory is also the same. Like the conservation dealing with people can develop mapped memory. We often use the environment, the stereotype and the senses to develop a mental image of a people. Sometimes we will incur the memory from one image. Sometimes people will say it’s easier to remember some concepts or theories if they have implied some image on them. If you have experienced some difficulties in recalling some images, you can ask the social connection for help. Have you ever remembered a child of three, your pre-school teacher showed you a picture of image and asked you to tell a story? The social environment will embedded throughout the individual’s memory.

In order to have an understanding of memory, the brain function has been work independently with the social and interpersonal content. As Prager mentioned in chapter 5 “Memory is one expression of the mind’s relation to a body- an interchange between the feeling state and mental activity.” In the case of Ms A, she has suffered from an intolerable pain of the memory in the past, and from the misremembered of the memories between the past and the present, Prager argues that the social environment provides the explanations and understanding for the memory. And in returns, it makes one feel in social contact from remembering.

Remembering can not be separated from the social world .Prager argues that the social interaction can make a better way to explore the memory. In Ms A ’case, her response towards her father after the death of her father changed. Just in the case of the false memory, a patient will argue that she has been sexually abused in the childhood may not really happened. In Shengold’s Soul murder in chapter 2 (p.60) “Unconscious fantasies generated by trauma transform the world into a largely hostile and unlivable environment.” Some people will misremember the past by adding some “artificial” elements in retrieving the details in the past. Misremembering in the case of Ms A also made the contribution for Prager in his book. As we know, different people will record a same thing in the past differently. As mentioned in Chapter 5 (p.203) “It is well-known that the past can be remembered differently as one’s experiences in the present change over time” People can be misremembered the things in the past due to the effect of the present situation. If you have a negative thing happen now, it can be easily infer the negative feelings from the past. People will prescribe differently in some cases when compared to others. Example, if you have witnessed a big disaster, you will trace back to unhappiness memories in the past. In a class research conducted in the Psychology 112LM in University of California, Irvine, it concluded that people’s perceptions towards some events depend on their present emotions and the level of depression rate. The body and the inner state will act together and make the feeling right now.

The “inscribed past” that Prager inscribed is permanent and an important determinant towards one’s present emotional state. The present remembering must be causally connected in an appropriate way to the past experience being recollected. The present emotional state will affect the prescription towards the past memories. The current experience has been inscribed in the past due to the prior relationships and contacts. Even if we asked you to recall the precious lost in the shopping mall when you were