Scientists at Emory University claim they have found evidence of the inheritance of memory from previous generations in mice whose “forefathers” had been trained to be afraid of the smell of cherry blossoms and who appeared to remember this fear. This is another example of current research in epigenetics that seems to confirm theories of memory inheritance that have been unfashionable in the scientific community for about a century. It’s time to take a short trip down memory lane and do a quick review of the history of this idea, which had a LOT of resonance in German-speaking lands.
The Swiss clinical psychologist Auguste Forel (1848-1931) was one of the most prominent proponents of the idea, and he freely connected heredity and memory, announcing that they were the same thing. He pointed to two kinds of memory, species memory, or Artgedächtnis, and individual memory. A “hidden script” passes between the two types of memory and in both directions. The individual’s experience changes the plot of the script in collective, species memory. While the individual’s memory also contains the script written by his forefathers. Forel’s ideas linking memory to biology follow from the theory brought forth by other biologists such as the German Ewald Herig (1831-1918), who explained memory as a reproductive capacity of all living creatures. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) reiterated roughly the same ideas in his Principles of Psychology (1855) where he invented the term “organic memory” to describe the biological processes at work in the human psyche.
A theory of the inheritance previous generations’ experience comes of course most famously from the naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck with his concept of the “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” which suggested a role for memory in the transmission of experiences. Darwin accepted this thesis of Lamarck’s as true and developed his own hypothesis about the mechanism of heredity, pangenesis. However, Darwin’s theory of heredity and Lamarck’s concept of inherited characteristics both fell out of favor in biology in the early 20th century when Mendelian genetics became the standard explanation for heredity. But interest in the idea of inherited memory never truly died.
The idea of a transgenerational memory as a way that experiences and cultural traits were preserved and transmitted was also the thesis of the German zoologist and memory theorist, Richard Semon (1859-1918) who offered a psychological explanation of heredity by equating it with a process of unconscious memory. He coined three new memory concepts: engraphy (the ability to acquire new knowledge), engram (the permanent changes for retention of memory), and ecphory (recovery of past knowledge).
And then there’s Freud. In Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion, Freud makes a “discovery” about the history of the Jewish people by analyzing their inherited, collective memory: Moses, the leader who brought them out of Egypt in the Exodus, was not a Jew, but an Egyptian. According to Freud, after the Jews were “chosen” by the Egyptian Moses to be the bearers of the strict, monotheistic religion he entrusted to them, which included the Egyptian practice of circumcision, the Jews murdered him in protest. This suppressed memory material, according to Freud, is expressed as an unspoken ambivalence, or “blood guilt” among Jews that has been transmitted unconsciously and biologically through the generations as an instinctive thought that had to be repressed through ritual and covered up through a mythical “Judaization” of Moses. The Jewish inheritance of this legacy has been a source of perennial historical trouble to the Jews, Freud observes. Because Freud believed in the Lamarckian idea that the individual has in his/her psychic life not only personal memory, but also the accumulated memories of the species or race, he believes that Jews themselves contain the memory of the murder of Moses, and that this memory is passed on between Jewish generations through biological processes. There’s a lot that is problematic in Freud’s thesis, not the least of which is that he wrote his essay on Moses in 1939, after his flight from Vienna following the German Nazi annexation of Austria, and during his exile in London.