From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu 24 Mar 2005 - 06:07:56 GMT
Kate:
The part of your book where you touch upon memetic
recombination has me remembering an essay Jung had
written about cryptomnesia (the phenomenon of "hidden
memories"). The basic idea of Jung's essay is that
so-called novelty results from a sort of
recombination. He said: "...only the combinations are
new, not the material, which hardly alters at all, or
only very slowly and almost imperceptibily." He
focuses on how fragments of memory could arise in new
contexts and points to a passage in Nietzsche's
_Zarathustra_ that is strikingly similar to a passage
in a book, by Justinus Kerner, Nietzsche may have read
when he was younger. If so, this memory fragment of
Nietzsche's recombined with other material as he
formed his masterpiece.
So if we look at Nietzsche's work as a representation
or "cultural DNA" could we say that Jung's literary
forensics work was a sort of "cultural DNA
fingerprinting" which supports the case for Kerner as
the intellectual father of this particular fragment?
Jung, while conducting a paternity test, compared
passages from Nietzsche's _Zarathustra_ and Justinus
Kerner's _Blatter aus Prevorst_. Is this textual
analysis akin to DNA fingerprinting? If so please kick
me for the suggestion of such an analogy :-)
Ref:
Carl Jung. "Cryptomnesia" from _Psychiatric Studies_.
1957. Bollingen Foundation, New York
Jung's work is summarized by Daniel Schacter in his
_The Seven Sins of Memory_.
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