We mark our moments with clocks, dates, and calendars. We try to fix our experiences in time and memory. But time has a way of eroding, distorting, and transforming experience, especially its memory. Some people jokingly call the recollection of the past revisionist history. Memoirists will tell you about the moment when their lives seemed to become fictional. Memories fade, blur, refocus suddenly, even reappear in dreams. We think about our memories because, in a deep sense, they are us.
We take a history from our patients—timelines from the past. Many of us working in hospitals and clinics, as well as when completing insurance forms, are asked whether the patient is oriented to time, place, and person (oriented x 3). It’s important that we prioritize orientation in time. Perhaps this temporal orientation is the anchor in a sea of time, and we hold on to it above all else. Some of us rely solely on observable behavior or reported feelings rather than a detailed history.
Some of us take a family history and create a genogram. We all observe and listen. Some of us hear a story, a narrative, a collection of themes we connect to other pieces of knowledge. All of us struggle to understand each other. Regardless of our theoretical approach, most of us gather some form of history. It guides and shapes us. Even psychologists mainly focused on a person’s current behavioral problems need to take at least a brief history to place the behavior within a time context. Every individual we meet tries to revisit past times through storytelling. Our work also takes place over time, and our own memories echo (counter transference) as we follow the narrative. Years ago, at a V.A. Clinic, I asked veterans to recall their parents’ disciplinary styles. “Well, how do we know if it’s true?” someone asked. “It’s all that’s left,” I answered. I then asked the veterans to describe how they disciplined their own children, and indeed, there was a similarity between their memories of their parents and their own reported behaviors. It was all that was left, literally.
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