 | This article possibly contains original research .(April 2023) |
Cryptomnesia occurs when a forgotten memory returns without its being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original. It is a memory bias whereby a person may falsely recall generating a thought, an idea, a tune, a name, or a joke; [1] they are not deliberately engaging in plagiarism, but are experiencing a memory as if it were a new inspiration.
Cryptomnesia was first documented in 1874, involving the medium Stainton Moses, who during a séance believed himself to be in spiritual contact with two brothers from India who had recently been killed. Despite the apparent communication, he was unable to ascertain any details which had not already been given in newspaper coverage of the story the week before. Researchers concluded that Moses had read the story but forgotten that he had read it, instead mistaking the partial memory for a message from the spirit world. [2] [3]
The word was first used by the psychiatrist Théodore Flournoy, [4] in reference to the case of medium Hélène Smith (Catherine-Élise Müller) to suggest the high incidence in psychism of "latent memories on the part of the medium that come out, sometimes greatly disfigured by a subliminal work of imagination or reasoning, as so often happens in our ordinary dreams."
Carl Gustav Jung treated the subject in his thesis "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena" (1902) [5] and in an article, "Cryptomnesia" (1905), [6] suggested the phenomenon in Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra . The idea was studied or mentioned by Géza Dukes, Sándor Ferenczi and Wilhelm Stekel as well as by Sigmund Freud in speaking of the originality of his inventions. [7] [8] Jacques Lacan illustrated the adaptability of the concept in his formulation of the ego ideal (the "ego" as Other [9] ) in refashioning the "case" of Margarite Pantaine (Case of Aimée). Her experiences of self-"misrecognition" provided a structure for Lacan's key subsequent theories of The Symbolic and the mirror stage. [10]
The word cryptomnesia is a compound of Greek cryptos (hidden, concealed, secret) and mnesia (memory).
In the first empirical study of cryptomnesia, people in a group took turns generating category examples (e.g., kinds of birds: parrot, canary, etc.). They were later asked to create new exemplars in the same categories that were not previously produced, and also to recall which words they had personally generated. People inadvertently plagiarized about 3–9% of the time either by regenerating another person's thought or falsely recalling someone's thought as their own. [11] Similar effects have been replicated using other tasks such as word search puzzles [12] [13] and in brainstorming sessions. [14]
Cryptomnesia is more likely to occur when the ability to properly monitor sources is impaired. For example, people are more likely to falsely claim ideas as their own when they were under high cognitive load at the time they first considered the idea. [15] Cryptomnesia increases when people are away from the original source of the idea, and decreases when participants are specifically instructed to pay attention to the origin of their ideas. False claims are also more prevalent for ideas originally suggested by persons of the same sex, presumably because the perceptual similarity of the self to a same-sex person exacerbates source confusion. In other studies it has been found that the timing of the idea is also important: if another person produces an idea immediately before the self produces an idea, the other's idea is more likely to be claimed as one's own, ostensibly because the person is too busy preparing for their own turn to properly monitor source information. [ citation needed ]
As explained by Carl Jung, [16] in Man and His Symbols, "An author may be writing steadily to a preconceived plan, working out an argument or developing the line of a story, when he suddenly runs off at a tangent. Perhaps a fresh idea has occurred to him, or a different image, or a whole new sub-plot. If you ask him what prompted the digression, he will not be able to tell you. He may not even have noticed the change, though he has now produced material that is entirely fresh and apparently unknown to him before. Yet it can sometimes be shown convincingly that what he has written bears a striking similarity to the work of another author — a work that he believes he has never seen."
Jorge Luis Borges's story, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," is a meta-fictive enactment of cryptomnesia. This work is written in the form of a review or literary critical piece about (the nonexistent) Pierre Menard. It begins with a brief introduction and a listing of all of Menard's work.
Borges's "review" describes this 20th-century French writer who has made an effort to go further than mere "translation" of Don Quixote, but to immerse himself so thoroughly as to be able to actually "re-create" it, line for line, in the original 17th century Spanish. Thus, "Pierre Menard" is always used to raise questions and discussion about the nature of accurate translation or, in this case, the hermeneutics of cryptomnesia.
Jung gives the following example in Man and His Symbols . [17] Friedrich Nietzsche's book Thus Spoke Zarathustra includes an almost word for word account of an incident also included in a book published about 1835, half a century before Nietzsche wrote. This is considered to be neither purposeful plagiarism nor pure coincidence: Nietzsche's sister confirmed that he had indeed read the original account when he was younger, likely sometime between ages 12 and 15; Nietzsche's youthful intellectual capabilities, his later cognitive degeneration, and his accompanying psychological deterioration (specifically, his increasing grandiosity as manifested in his later behavior and writings) together strengthen the likelihood that he happened to commit the passage to memory upon initially reading it and later, after having lost his memory of encountering it, assumed that his own mind had created it. [18]
In some cases, the line between cryptomnesia and zeitgeist (compare the concept of multiple discovery in science) may be somewhat hazy. Readers of Lord Byron's closet drama Manfred noted a strong resemblance to Goethe's Faust . In a review published in 1820, Goethe wrote, "Byron's tragedy Manfred was to me a wonderful phenomenon, and one that closely touched me. This singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strangest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains the same; and it is particularly on this account that I cannot enough admire his genius." [19] Byron was apparently thankful for the compliment; however, he claimed that he had never read Faustus.
J. M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, was aware of the occurrence of cryptomnesia. In Peter and Wendy [20] Wendy sews Peter's shadow back on and this makes him very happy but he immediately thinks he has attached the shadow himself:
"How clever I am," he crowed rapturously, "oh, the cleverness of me!"
Peter exhibits a number of other clinically accurate peculiarities of memory suggesting that Barrie regarded Peter's behavior as a memory disorder rather than self-centredness. [21]
Helen Keller compromised her own and her teacher's credibility with an incident of cryptomnesia which was misinterpreted as plagiarism. [22] The Frost King , which Keller wrote out of buried memories of the fairy tale The Frost Fairies by Margaret Canby, read to her four years previously, left Keller a nervous wreck,[ citation needed ] and unable to write fiction for the rest of her life. [23]
Robert Louis Stevenson refers to an incident of cryptomnesia that took place during the writing of Treasure Island , and that he discovered to his embarrassment several years afterward:
... I am now upon a painful chapter. No doubt the parrot once belonged to Robinson Crusoe. No doubt the skeleton is conveyed from Poe. I think little of these, they are trifles and details; and no man can hope to have a monopoly of skeletons or make a corner in talking birds. The stockade, I am told, is from Masterman Ready . It may be, I care not a jot. These useful writers had fulfilled the poet's saying: departing, they had left behind them Footprints on the sands of time, Footprints which perhaps another—and I was the other! It is my debt to Washington Irving that exercises my conscience, and justly so, for I believe plagiarism was rarely carried farther. I chanced to pick up the Tales of a Traveller some years ago with a view to an anthology of prose narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: Billy Bones, his chest, the company in the parlour, the whole inner spirit, and a good deal of the material detail of my first chapters—all were there, all were the property of Washington Irving. But I had no guess of it then as I sat writing by the fireside, in what seemed the spring-tides of a somewhat pedestrian inspiration; nor yet day by day, after lunch, as I read aloud my morning's work to the family. It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like my right eye ... [24]
Jerusalem of Gold (ירושלים של זהב) is a 1967 song by Naomi Shemer. Some of the song's melody is based on a Basque lullaby, Pello Joxepe , [25] composed by Juan Francisco Petriarena 'Xenpelar' (1835–1869). Shemer heard a rendition by Spanish singer/songwriter Paco Ibáñez, who visited Israel in 1962 and performed the song to a group that included her and Nehama Hendel. She later acknowledged hearing Hendel perform Pello Joxepe in the mid-1960s, and that she had unconsciously based some of the melody on the lullaby. Shemer felt very bad when she found that it was similar to Pello Joxepe, but when Ibáñez was asked how he felt about the issue, he replied he was "glad it helped in some way", and that he was not angry, nor did he perceive it as plagiarism. [26]
In 1984, when Aerosmith were recording Done With Mirrors, lead singer Steven Tyler heard the group's "You See Me Crying" on the radio and, not remembering that it was their own song, suggested that the group record a cover version, to which guitarist Joe Perry replied, "That's us, fuckhead!". [27]
The precedent in United States copyright law, since 1976, has been to treat alleged cryptomnesia no differently from deliberate plagiarism. The seminal case is Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, [28] where the publisher of "He's So Fine," written and composed by Ronald Mack, demonstrated to the court that George Harrison borrowed substantial portions of his song "My Sweet Lord" from "He's So Fine." The Court imposed damages despite a claim that the copying was subconscious. The ruling was upheld by the Second Circuit in ABKCO Music v. Harrisongs Music, [29] and the case Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton, [30] upheld by the Ninth Circuit, affirmed the principle.
In 1987, Australian author Colleen McCullough published a novella, The Ladies of Missalonghi . Critics alleged that she had plagiarised The Blue Castle , a 1926 novel by L. M. Montgomery. McCullough acknowledged having read Montgomery's works in her youth, but attributed the similarities to subconscious recollection. [31]
In Interpretation and Overinterpretation, Umberto Eco describes the rediscovery of an antique book among his large collection, which was eerily similar to the pivotal object in his novel The Name of the Rose .
I had bought that book in my youth, skimmed through it, realized that it was exceptionally soiled, and put it somewhere and forgot it. But by a sort of internal camera I had photographed those pages, and for decades the image of those poisonous leaves lay in the most remote part of my soul, as in a grave, until the moment it emerged again (I do not know for what reason) and I believed I had invented it. [32]
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900, after experiencing pneumonia and multiple strokes.
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. He was a prolific author, illustrator, and correspondent, and a complex and controversial character, presumably best known through his "autobiography" Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
In psychoanalysis and other psychological theories, the unconscious mind is the part of the psyche that is not available to introspection. Although these processes exist beneath the surface of conscious awareness, they are thought to exert an effect on conscious thought processes and behavior. Empirical evidence suggests that unconscious phenomena include repressed feelings and desires, memories, automatic skills, subliminal perceptions, and automatic reactions. The term was coined by the 18th-century German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
"Rat Man" was the nickname given by Sigmund Freud to a patient whose "case history" was published as Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose ["Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis"] (1909). This was the second of six case histories that Freud published and the first in which he claimed that the patient had been cured by psychoanalysis.
Collective unconscious refers to the unconscious mind and shared mental concepts. It is generally associated with idealism and was coined by Carl Jung. According to Jung, the human collective unconscious is populated by instincts, as well as by archetypes: ancient primal symbols such as The Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Shadow, the Tower, Water, and the Tree of Life. Jung considered the collective unconscious to underpin and surround the unconscious mind, distinguishing it from the personal unconscious of Freudian psychoanalysis. He believed that the concept of the collective unconscious helps to explain why similar themes occur in mythologies around the world. He argued that the collective unconscious had a profound influence on the lives of individuals, who lived out its symbols and clothed them in meaning through their experiences. The psychotherapeutic practice of analytical psychology revolves around examining the patient's relationship to the collective unconscious.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, also translated as Thus Spake Zarathustra, is a work of philosophical fiction written by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche; it was published in four volumes between 1883 and 1885. The protagonist is nominally the historical Zoroaster.
Analytical psychology is a term coined by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, to describe research into his new "empirical science" of the psyche. It was designed to distinguish it from Freud's psychoanalytic theories as their seven-year collaboration on psychoanalysis was drawing to an end between 1912 and 1913. The evolution of his science is contained in his monumental opus, the Collected Works, written over sixty years of his lifetime.
In psychology, sublimation is a mature type of defense mechanism, in which socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior, possibly resulting in a long-term conversion of the initial impulse.
A complex is a structure in the unconscious that is objectified as an underlying theme—like a power or a status—by grouping clusters of emotions, memories, perceptions and wishes in response to a threat to the stability of the self. In psychoanalysis, it is antithetical to drives.
The will to power is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force in humans. However, the concept was never systematically defined in Nietzsche's work, leaving its interpretation open to debate. Usage of the term by Nietzsche can be summarized as self-determination, the concept of actualizing one's will onto one's self or one's surroundings, and coincides heavily with egoism.
The expression immaculate perception, used by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his text Thus Spoke Zarathustra; the term pertains to the idea of "pure knowledge." Nietzsche argues that "immaculate perception" is fictional because it ignores the intimate connection between the perceiver and the external world. He argues that humans are fallible and are capable of using data to ratify or refute perceptions. He also clarifies that perception is value-laden and can be ruled by our interests.
The Collected Worksof C. G. Jung is a book series containing the first collected edition, in English translation, of the major writings of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung.
Friedrich Nietzsche's influence and reception varied widely and may be roughly divided into various chronological periods. Reactions were anything but uniform, and proponents of various ideologies attempted to appropriate his work quite early.
A source-monitoring error is a type of memory error where the source of a memory is incorrectly attributed to some specific recollected experience. For example, individuals may learn about a current event from a friend, but later report having learned about it on the local news, thus reflecting an incorrect source attribution. This error occurs when normal perceptual and reflective processes are disrupted, either by limited encoding of source information or by disruption to the judgment processes used in source-monitoring. Depression, high stress levels and damage to relevant brain areas are examples of factors that can cause such disruption and hence source-monitoring errors.
"Peio Joxepe" is a traditional Navarrese song. It is very popular in the Basque Country, as its music is used by bertsolariak to improvise their compositions. Therefore, it may be sung with different lyrics.
The ideas of the 19th century German philosophers Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche have been compared frequently. Many authors have discussed apparent similarities in their writings, sometimes raising the question of influences. In Germany, during the early years of Nietzsche's emergence as a well-known figure, the only thinker who discussed his ideas more often than Stirner was Arthur Schopenhauer. It is certain that Nietzsche read about Stirner's book The Ego and Its Own, which was mentioned in Friedrich Albert Lange's History of Materialism and Critique of its Present Importance (1866) and Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869), both of which young Nietzsche knew well. However, there is no irrefutable indication that he actually read it as no mention of Stirner is known to exist anywhere in Nietzsche's publications, papers or correspondence.
The relation between anarchism and Friedrich Nietzsche has been ambiguous. Even though Nietzsche criticized anarchists, his thought proved influential for many of them. As such "[t]here were many things that drew anarchists to Nietzsche: his hatred of the state; his disgust for the mindless social behavior of 'herds'; his anti-Christianity; his distrust of the effect of both the market and the State on cultural production; his desire for an 'übermensch'—that is, for a new human who was to be neither master nor slave".
In psychology, the misattribution of memory or source misattribution is the misidentification of the origin of a memory by the person making the memory recall. Misattribution is likely to occur when individuals are unable to monitor and control the influence of their attitudes, toward their judgments, at the time of retrieval. Misattribution is divided into three components: cryptomnesia, false memories, and source confusion. It was originally noted as one of Daniel Schacter's seven sins of memory.
Also sprach Zarathustra is the oil painting cycle by Lena Hades painted from 1995 to 1997 and inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical novel of the same name. The painter created her first painting in December 1995 in Moscow. The Thus Spake Zarathustra cycle is a series of twenty-eight oil paintings made by the artist from 1995 to 1997 and thirty graphic works made in 2009. Twenty-four of the paintings depict so-called round-headed little men and their struggles in life. The remaining four depict Zarathustra himself, his eagle and serpent. Six paintings of the series were purchased by the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and by private collectors. The oil painting Also Sprach Zarathustra series was exhibited several times — including the exhibition at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1997 and at the First Moscow Biennale of contemporary art in 2005.
An early example of this occurred in 1874 with he medium William Stanton Moses, who communicated with the spirits of two brothers who had recently died in India. Upon investigation, it was discovered that one week prior to the séance, their obituary had appeared in the newspaper. This was of some importance because Moses's communications with the two spirits contained nothing that wasn't already printed in the newspaper. When the spirits were pressed for further information, they were unable to provide any. Researchers concluded that Moses had seen the obituary, forgotten it, and then resurfaced the memory during the séance.
The book of adventure stories as "source" was discovered by Carl Jung, who describes his find, and his subsequent belief that Nietzsche had "crpytomnesia," the concealed recollection of a textual memory, to his seminar of fellow depth psychologists who gathered once a week between 1934 and 1939 to analyze Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The piece of text "secretly crept up and reproduced itself" in "Of Great Events" (Z 2). Jung recognized the story about seamen stopping on an island to hunt rabbits, having read it in his grandfather's library. He wrote Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, who confirmed that she and Nietzsche had read the same book in their grandfather's library, when Nietzsche was eleven. This, Jung informed his Zarathustra seminar, "shows how the unconscious layers of the mind work." He added, "the absolute parallel is of course formed by the rabbits" (1218).
