Time and Memory in Historical Awareness

Abstract

Every individual carries within themselves their own historical consciousness. It is a past experience, based and built together with the process of their own individuation. It is a unique feeling and place, from which one experiences life and immersion in the historical flow. A perspective so particular that it cannot be experienced by anyone other than oneself. It is a profound understanding encapsulated and, in a way, crystallized in assumptions derived from experiences, memories, and mental abstractions, which have been consciously and unconsciously constructed throughout life. It is a psychological repository to which the individual turns – mostly unconsciously – to understand the environment around them, to position themselves, reflect, and make decisions. But self-awareness or the process of "consciousness-raising," as proposed by Paulo Freire in his book of the same name, does not only rely on the subject's autogenous experiences; rather, it is a holistic construction in which the sharing of social memories substantiated in narratives, interactions, and experiences of others constitutes a significant portion of the genesis of the social universe in which that individual is immersed. In this context, History as a humanities science cannot disregard considering the most elementary human aspect in the process of constructing consciousness and memory, the biological and evolutionary mechanisms that govern them and, in the evolutionary hierarchy of reason, dissociate us from other living beings. However, according to Carl Gustav Jung (1960), Alfred Adler (1945), Paulo Freire (2016), António Damásio (2018), and Jörn Rüsen himself (2010), in the convergence of various views on the formation of consciousness, they agree that it primarily erupts from the animal portion of our human side, emerging from the most essential biological imperatives, from which all logic and principles sustaining our modern procedural, decision-making, otherness, memory, critical sense, and, in turn, historical consciousness mechanisms arise. Therefore, the reasons why individual, collective, social, and archetypal memories are so crucial for psychic balance, social insertion, historical orientation, and awareness would lie in the primordial impulses of self-preservation, social flourishing, and infinity. Providing the fundamental subsidies for dealing with complex, psychologically sensitive feelings potentially capable of generating neuroses, such as historical tragedies and traumas. Memory instrumentalizes but also oppresses; everything depends on the process of awareness.