From: Kate Distin (memes@distin.co.uk)
Date: Thu 24 Mar 2005 - 09:15:44 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_.
>
>
Scott - I don't know about DNA fingerprinting but I really like this
example.
Kate
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