© Copyright – all rights reserved – Dietmar J. Wetzel (2020) 1 Maurice Halbwachs – Collectives Memory and Forgetting 1 Dietmar J. Wetzel Introduction The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) is generally considered to be the classic reference of the sociology of memory. 2 The central object of inquiry in his studies on memory is collective memory. 3 Various reproaches have been directed at both Halbwachs and the Durkheim school as a whole for having underestimated the significance of forgetting in the reconstruction of the process of memory, as well as at Halbwachs in particular for not having taken into account what psychoanalysis had to say about forgetting (Brian 2008). Halbwachs, however, by no means ignored Freud; instead he explicitly provided a critical discussion of him in one of his three main works on the theory of memory, i.e. in Cadres Sociaux de la mémoire (The Social Frameworks of Memory) ([1925] 1992). 4 According to Jan Assmann, the elaborate indications provided in this work on the significance of frameworks can explain not only memory but also forgetting (Assmann 2007: 36). How is this possible? In his work, Halbwachs repeatedly discussed the value of various social frames of reference 1 Revised version of the text „Maurice Halbwachs: Vergessen und kollektives Gedächtnis, in: Oliver Dimbath und Peter Wehling (Hg.), Soziologie des Vergessens. Konstanz: UVK, 2011, 37-55. 2 On this point, see also Wetzel (2009a and 2009b), Coser (1992a and 1992b) and the volume edited by Stephan Egger with elaborations and a critique of Halbwachs (Egger 2003). Interestingly, the English experimental psychologist F. C. Bartlett (1923) arrived at a similar approach to Halbwachs’ around the same time, and his work was later developed by authors such as Middleton and Edwards (1990) into a ‘social-constructivist theory of memory’. 3 Halbwachs’ status as a classic of the sociology of memory stems essentially from three works: Les Cadres Sociaux de la mémoire (1925, Eng. 199), La mémoire collective (1950, Eng. 1980), and La topographie légendaire des évangiles en Terre sainte (1941, Eng. 1992). 4 Halbwachs’ discussion of Freud is concentrated in the chapter on ‘Dreams and Memory Images’ (pp. 41-42) and ‘Language and Memory’ (pp. 43-45). Halbwachs shared with Freud the insight according to which memory is based on the interplay between repetition and rediscovery, whereby, however, memory obeys a social dynamic and not the psychological one assumed by Freud (see, Hutton 1994: 149). Hutton points out three more crucial points in relation to Halbwachs: ‘First, he contended that in repetition memories are not transmitted intact. Rather they are conflated as they are being continuously revised. In each repetition of an experience, particular idiosyncrasies are worn away. That which is remembered of often repeated experience is a reduction of particular memories into an idealized image, or imago. Second, he proposed that in recollection memories are reconstructed within social contexts’ (ibid, 149). Finally, Halbwachs did not hold dreams, designated by Freud as the ‘royal way to the unconscious’, to be suitable for understanding the processes of memory, because dreams are detached from social contexts: ‘ We cannot remember while we are dreaming because our social contexts have been removed’ (ebd. 150).