Abstract

CASANOVA REIS, Alice  and  VAINER SCHUCMAN, Lia. The social constitution of memory: memories of a World War II witness. Psicol. rev. (Belo Horizonte) [online]. 2010, vol.16, n.2, pp. 388-408. ISSN 1677-1168.

This article aims to investigate how the memory of a World War II witness is constituted. For such, we interviewed a man who told us the memories of his experiences during the war. Based on Social Psychology, in a social and historical approach, we conceived memory as socially and historically constructed and as constitutive of the subjectivity of the one who remembers. The analysis identified the meaning cores present in the interviewee’s narrative through the following categories: national collective memory, remembrance-memory and habit-memory, memory as judgment of the past, ambiguities of memory, memory and Jewish identity. We concluded that the interviewee’s memory of the war is shaped by a unique appropriation of that collective experience, mediated by social, cultural, group and class values, as well as ideological aspects and individual experiences

Keywords : memory; subjectivity; World War II; Social psychology.

        · abstract in Portuguese | Spanish     · text in Portuguese     · Portuguese ( pdf )