Evolution of “ Memory Studies ” : Between Psychology and Sociology

The article examines the problem of the “ memory studies ” development and the role that psychology and sociology play in the development of this interdisciplinary field of humanities. The authors divide the history of memory studies into two periods. The analysis of the first stage of the conceptual formation of memory research, starting from the end of the XIX century and till the first part of the century, first of all, on the basis of psychological, sociological is revealed. The authors demonstrate the trajectory of the evolution of the scientific understanding of “ memory ” from a purely psychological interpretation of the phenomenon to a socio-psychological concept (group memory), to a broad sociological theory (socio-cultural and historical memory). It is shown how at the second stage of the memory studies development, starting from the second half of the XX century till the present time, sociological research unfolds in the paradigm of memory studies and at the same time there is a new growth of interest in the psychological point of these studies. This is reflected in the development of psychoanalytic concepts, biographical research methods, and the increased role of oral history. It is concluded that the dialectical interaction of sociology and psychology in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies forms the basis of the heuristic potential of this modern humanities research.


Introduction
"Memory studies" is an interdisciplinary field of modern humanities, which originated at the end of the XIX century and reached its apogee in the 1980s of the XX century, which continues to the present day. In all the variety of studies and approaches in this direction that have been unfolding for more than a century, one can notice a clear theoretical fluctuation: the alternate dominance of the psychological and sociological aspects in the content of the "memory" concept at different stages of development or by different researchers in this interdisciplinary field.
Memory studies are focused on the study of historical, cultural, social, group memory in modern societies and in the past. In general, it would be possible to underline the trajectory of evolution of the scholarly understanding of memory. It began as a purely psychological concept, i.e., memory as an individual psychological phenomenon. Later, it made a transformation to sociopsychological concept, i.e., "group memory", and, finally, to sociological concept, that is, "social memory." New concepts of memory emerged: "historical" (memory of the past in the public opinion of common people as well as among professional historians), "cultural understanding" (history in the experience of large social groups and masses) and, in some cases, a socio-political understanding of memory or "collective memory" (as an object of political manipulation).
The aim of the article is to research the trajectory of the evolution of the scientific understanding of "memory" from a purely psychological interpretation of the phenomenon to a socio-psychological concept (group memory), to a broad sociological theory (socio-cultural and historical memory) and attempts to return to the psychological component of social memory research at a new level. It is also aimed to show how dialectical interaction of sociology and psychology in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies forms the basis of the heuristic potential of this modern humanities research.

Methodology
The methodology of the work is based on Marxist and phenomenological theories. It is known that historical memory is conditioned both by ideological manipulations and other attempts of violent formation of the historical consciousness of the masses, officially prescribed by the authorities. In this kind, memory can be seen a specific form of oppression. But here is not always clear the technique of social memory, that is, how certain events, characters, images are removed from the historical consciousness or, conversely, imposed on him. Some regularities in the functioning of collective historical memory can be explained by direct, though cautious extrapolation to the area of historical knowledge of psychological laws. On the other hand, some of the relevant mechanisms of such memory are not so spontaneous and easily identifiable. Memory of this kind is causally and functionally dependent on factors that are much easier to verbally identify than to reveal in their real manifestation (Pushkareva, 2008). Of course, the memory mechanisms included the forgetting mechanisms, as well as other mechanismscontamination, re-emphasis, silence, approval (Pushkareva, 2008).
Its use in the social process in certain interests, but since interest, as shown in classical Marxism, is not always realized by his followers, the mechanisms of memory often act unconsciously or their action leads to unexpected, or rather, not anticipated results. And here, as we can see, we are not in the field of psychological, but actually socio-historical laws. For example, in periods of dynamic social change and transformations, the collective memory of the past becomes of increasing importance. The memory of the past, in the form of traditional sociocultural patterns, as well as archaic economic and social models, is updated and reanimated (Pushkareva, 2008). It helps society as a whole (or certain social groups) to adapt to dramatic changes and fill the emerging cultural and value "vacuum" for some time (Nikolaeva, 2005).
If we approach the problem of memory from a philosophical, that is, methodological side, it turns out that social memory appears primarily as a cultural determinant of social development, and the scientific interpretation of historical time then depends on our understanding of culture as a whole. Considering culture in the traditions of 'experiential' theory -where the culture is understood as a socially significant experience of human activity transmitted from generation to generation (Muravyov, 1995) -it is possible to consider the temporality captured in the nodes of historical memory as the quintessence of the secondary determination of society (Pushkareva, 2001).
Thus, memory is a condition for the existence of culture, if we consider culture as a socially significant experience of human activity. Culture is transmitted through language, demonstration, example, and this translation is impossible without the existence of mechanisms of social memory.
It is well known that memory is selective. It is less obvious that this seemingly purely psychological law also applies at the level of society. However, and, perhaps, precisely because of the nature of this selectivity, the selection mechanisms still remained largely mysterious. It is not always clear on what principle some events are recorded by memory for years, decades, centuries, and others are "erased", disappeared from memory, and therefore sometimes from history.
At the stage of origin of memory studies, it is possible to fix counter attempts of psychologists, sociologists and historians to prove the need of new concepts -"collective memory", "group memory", "historical memory", emphasizing social and cultural sense of memory and social time. The development of this terminology can be considered successfully, although it is still criticized, which points to the anthropomorphizing of the society which is possible when transferring individual psychological mechanisms to the social level occurs. The idea of the existence of collective (or social) structures of consciousness in the XIX -early XX century was developed not only in social psychology, but in almost all humanities. At the same time, rather diverse set of concepts was proposed: "social consciousness" in political economy and philosophy (K. Marx), "collective ideas" (E. Durkheim), "social stereotype" (W. Lippman) in sociology, "social ideas" (B. Malinovsky) and "mentality" (Lucien Lévy-Bruhn) in cultural anthropology. This line is complemented by neo-Marxists Louis Pierre Althusser, who argued that the actions of individuals in modern society are mainly programmed by the ideological apparatus of the state (Althusser, 2011).
However, the method of anthropomorphizing the research object, which has long been practiced by researchers spontaneously, in the 1960s received its theoretical justification in the paradoxical works of Merleau-Ponty (1999), and, thus, theoretically legalized.

Results
From the point of view of the dialectics of sociology and psychology, there are two stages in the evolution of memory studies: approximately until the middle of the XX century and after.

The counter-movement of psychology and sociology in the evolution of memory studies in the first half of the twentieth century
Throughout the history of philosophy, the concepts of time and memory were somehow thematized by philosophers of different directions, review of the basic concepts was made by M. S. Rogovin (1921Rogovin ( -1993 (Rogovin, 1966). But only in the 20-30s of the XX century there appears the study of memory from a fundamentally new point of view -the social one. Based on the analysis of historical documents, data of ethnography, socio-psychological experiments by representatives of socio-humanitarian sciences, it is concluded that human memory has a social character. Then, the concept of social memory itself is formed and introduced into scientific use. Let's see how it happens.
A great contribution to the formation of a new view of human memory was made within the framework of social psychology and sociology. A gnoseological stimulus and a kind of provocation to begin forming a new view of the problems of human memory were the ideas of the French philosopher-intuitionist, representative of the "philosophy of life" Henri Bergson (1859Bergson ( -1941. Bergson attached great importance to memory, calling it a point of contact between the spirit and matter. In his works, he defended the idea that the "duration", interpreted as filled with subjective experiences image of a certain substance underlying all phenomena, and there is a memory inherent in all current things, thus possible memory of a single person (Bergson [1914(Bergson [ ], 1992. The French psychologist Pierre Jean (1859-1947) criticized Bergson's thesis, stressing, that an isolated individual does not have memory, because he does not need it. Considering first of all examples of pathological development of separate persons memory, Jean is not limited to it and expands the concept to scales of social psychology, considers evolution of memory in anthropogenesis. He considers memory primarily as verbal, as a specific answer to a question, to a word. Jean's works were written a little less than a century ago, but his ideas are important for understanding the social, historical, cultural time and memory, in which the narrative, the story (narrative) really takes a very important place. Also, for the further development of the study of social memory there was an important conclusion of Jean that memorization and reproduction are not reproductive, and constructive. An important thing for modern "memory studies" is described by Jean and traumatic cases of amnesia, which he explains a kind of fear -"fear of remembering" (Janet, 1928).
The cultural and historical concept of Russian psychologists L. S. Vygotsky (1896Vygotsky ( -1934 and A. R. Luria (1902A. R. Luria ( -1977, in which the ideas of P. Jean developed, outlined the broadest and most general scheme of the memory development as a mental phenomenon, covering the entire written history of mankind. The decisive moment in the evolution of memory is the creation of an artificial sign as a tool, a means of remembering. Only through the mediated nature of mental processes, a person can change the surrounding reality and make behavior reasonable. L. Vygotsky was proposed the term "collective psychology", allowing shifting on group individual scheme memories developed the ideas of J.-G. de Tard, who studied the "psychology of masses" were developed in a close direction.
L. Vygotsky wrote in the 20s of XX century: "Everything in us is social, but this does not mean that all the properties of the individual psyche are inherent in all other members of this group. Only some part of personal psychology can be considered as belonging to this collective, and this part of the personal psyche in the conditions of its collective manifestation is studied every time by collective psychology, examining the psychology of the army, the Church, etc." [Vygotsky, 1997: 22].
At the same time, within the framework of sociology, the theory of social time was developed, which made a kind of counter steps to psychological theories in its interpretations of time and memory. Emil Durkheim (1858Durkheim ( -1917 managed to justify the fundamental difference between astronomical and social time, to show the independence of social time not only from individual consciousness, but also from natural rhythms, to prove its socio-cultural value and variability (Durkheim, 2001). Durkheim even in 1898 spoke about the need to create a branch of sociology that studies the "laws of the collective existence of ideas" (Durkheim, 1995: 341), which in our opinion is closely related to the mechanisms of memory and oblivion, and this is still a task that is not yet accomplished.
Russian and American sociologists P. Sorokin (1889-1968) and R. Merton (1910-2003 successfully continued this tradition (Sorokin & Merton, 1990;Sorokin, 1964). They emphasized the qualitative character of social time as immanent to cultural rhythms. They believed that social time expressed the change or movement of social phenomena in terms of other social phenomena taken as reference points. In addition, these reference points express much more than the nominal equivalent of astronomical or calendar value. Timing systems always reflect the social actions of a group. Some beginning, arbitrary or not, must be established to introduce any system of calculating time, which must be continuous. For this purpose, it is inevitable to refer to the date of some selected historical event. In all cases, the point of reference is social or associated with deep social meanings; it is always a case that is regarded as a specific social meaning. Sorokin and Merton write: "In all cases the point of departure as social or imbued with profound social implications; it is always an event which is regarded as one of peculiar social significance. Thus, there have been introduced such social frames of reference as the death of Alexander or the Battle of Geza among the Babylonians, the Olympiads among the Greeks, the founding of Rome (anno urbis conditae) and the Battle of Actium among the Romans, the persecution of Diocletian and the birth of Christ among the Christians, the mythological founding of the Japanese Empire by Jimmu Tenno and the discovery of copper (Wado era), in Japan, the Hegira among the Mohammedans, the event of the white pheasant having been presented to the Japanese emperor (Hakuchi era), never had any idea of dating the annals except by the years of rule of the reigning Pharaoh. The Armenians likewise reckoned by the number of years of the kings or of the patriarchs. From these few examples culled from an almost inexhaustible store we see some justification of the proposition that nations form their eras in terms of some remarkable event which has social implications)" (Sorokin & Merton, 1937: 623-634). Thus, nations form their history based on a remarkable event that has social significance. We see here that it is memory that gives the qualitative character of social time, although Sorokin and Merton use the expression "social reference framework", thus avoiding the concept of "memory".
Today, the modern sociology of time, represented, for example, by the works of Anthony Giddens, considers social memory as the most important mechanism of the natural time organization (Giddens, 1984).
This discovery of sociologists in the temporal organization of society and cultural memory remains significant for modern analysis of society. Thus, many processes of radical transformation of modern society reveal themselves in the reformatting in the socio-cultural time organization, implying the choice of a new "reference point" of socio-cultural, historical time, a kind of "re-election" of the historical beginning. This is, of course, not a change in the system of chronology, but a metaphorical reference to significant events of the past as the start of a certain time stream. This reference looks like a memory of the "Golden age" or an indication of a catastrophe -events that have had a decisive impact on the present. This mechanism is equally characteristic of both the modernization processes and the society archaization processes, and most clearly represents the change in value horizons of social development.
But the main result of this period of counter-movement of sociology and psychology in understanding the phenomenon of memory was the famous work of Maurice Halbwaks, The Social Framework of Memory (1925), which begins the "legalization" and active dissemination of the concept of "group memory" and subsequent variations.
The concept of social memory in addition to Maurice Halbwachs was also developed by other representatives of "Annals" school. As you know, the task of the new school of "Annals" (1929) was to synthesize all social and humanitarian knowledge within the framework of history, overcoming disciplinary barriers. Attempts to synthesize socio-humanitarian knowledge within the framework of the school of annals were carried out, we can say, outside the philosophical reflection, and historians themselves emphasized their focus on empirical knowledge. Following the social psychologists Halbwachs insists on the fact that memories are reconstructed, rather than copying events: "...our minds just cannot pay attention to the past, not deforming it; rising to the surface, our memory is like transforming, changing shape, spoiled by intellectual light" (Halbwachs [1925(Halbwachs [ ], 2007. This thesis became a key one for the generation of historical memory researchers in the 80s of XX century. Maurice Halbwachs examines both the individual memory and the memory of groups -family, religious groups, social class-revealing the relationship of memory and tradition. However, this was exactly the work that became the incentive for the further psychologization of "memory studies". Halbwachs shows, how the "framework" family memory as a group memory becomes a synthesis of personal memories and social attitudes (Halbwachs,. Halbwachs shows the universality of the family as a social group, the "social complex". It also follows from Halbwachs' analysis, which is based mainly on primitive and ancient examples, that the family has hermeticity (associated with the tradition of domestic cults) and the desire for social adaptation through interaction and correlation with other families. After Halbwachs we tend to consider the family memory as a meaningful and at the same time available for transformation analysis of socio-cultural memory and values, and social horizons in modern society.
The famous German Egyptologist and cultural theorist Jan Assman complains that Halbwachs is not limited to the analysis of the "social framework" of memory, and "went even further, declaring the collective subject of memory and memories, creating the concept of 'group memory' and 'memory of the nation', in which the concept of memory turns into a metaphor" (Assmann, 2004: 37).
The work of M. Halbwachs was the result of a broad program of interdisciplinary synthesis of social and humanitarian sciences initiated by various scientific groups in the first decades of the XX century. Despite the fact that the theoretical experiments of Halbwachs still cause a critical response from historians, it was the school of "Annals", to which the French researcher belonged, that continued the line of synthesis of psychology and sociology, carried out on the material of written history.

Psychological turn of memory studies since the second half of the XX century
Under the psychological turn, we understand here the interest in describing the individual experience of an individual, fixing the memory of a particular life, and also the continuing trend of anthropomorphizing society in theoretical and applied research. We can also say that sociology itself is experiencing a psychological turn, turning to the study of everyday practices, using understanding rather than explaining methods, increasingly using qualitative rather than quantitative research methods.
It should be noted that the majority of temporal research in the social and humanitarian field since the 60s of the twentieth century is characterized by an increasing tendency to abandon generalizing concepts and schemes, a shift in the focus of research from the macro level to the micro level, and a total rejection of generalizations. Attention to individual memories, to individual experiences, which is reflected in the rapid development and institutionalization of oral history associated with the activities of the English historian Paul Thompson (1935) (Thompson, 2003). Thanks to the activities of Paul Thompson, the digital sound archive "National Life Stories" was founded, where thematic collections of the history of the life of British society are collected. Part of this unusual national archive is available through the Oral History section of the British Library (9), also as part of the Millennium Memory Bank project (Britain library. Oral history). Institutionalized collections of oral testimonies are found in the United States, the Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, Syria, China, as well as in the territory of the post-Soviet space in Uzbekistan and Belarus (Oral History). The biographical method is considered as one of the promising methods of the social and humanitarian sciences (Meshcherkina & Semenova, 1994).
The surge of attention to the problems of historical memory is mostly associated with the activities and work of Pierre Nora (born in 1931), who is the head of the "new historical school" (this is the modern name of "Annals" school) nowadays. In 1984, in connection with the anniversary celebration of The French revolution at the initiative and under the general editorship of Pierre Nora there began a publication of "Places of memory" seven volumes, which were catalogued monuments, ideas, symbols, texts, holidays, which were associated with the identity of the French nation. The "places of memory" concept, which today gave the name to the whole historical school, was borrowed by Pierre Nora from Frances Yates, who in her work Art of Memory (Yates, 1996), introduced this concept to describe the technique of mnemonics of speakers and speakers in the Middle Ages: to associate each thesis of his speech with a certain object (furniture, lamp, etc.) or area of space (atrium, window, etc.) in the audience.
According to the authors of the work (and in the compilation of Places of Memory, published in Gallimard Publ. House under the editorship P. Nora), history exists not in the form of wholes, but in the form of individual places, because historical memory has not preserved us a common continuous picture of history, and its individual places -all we have: the national archive, monuments to people or events, libraries, museums, cemeteries and architectural works, commemorations, anniversaries, textbooks, etc., generation, region.
In Germany, "memory studies" were associated primarily with the understanding of the Nazi past, which began in the country in the late 50s of the XX century. The iconic kneeling of Willy Brandt in front of the monuments to the Jews who died in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 and the public discussion of the collective guilt of the German people for the suffering caused by the Nazis to the other people, the section on the history of the XX century return to the school curriculum and the matured need to develop a "pedagogical version" of the past, the establishment of the journal History and Memory (1989), in the materials of which official remembrance and the state policy of memory became the topic of research, the Maastricht Agreement (1992) and the awareness of the need to restore cultural unity with a united Europe -these and other events in the political and public life of Germany formed and to a certain extent still form the political context of memory studies in Germany. But the concepts in which this experience was understood and is still being discussed are psychological: "trauma", "guilt", "repression", "grief" (Assman, 2006).
It is interesting to note that during French humanitarian thought ideas of memorial problems were emerging, related to the symbolic policy of the state, with actual social problems, in the German tradition there was obviously a psychoanalytic bias, in Russian philosophical and social thought social memory was often considered as a metaphorical synonym for the concept of "culture".
Thus, the Russian Soviet scientist Ya. K. Rebane introduces the concept of "social memory" in the domestic social science and defines it as "information accumulated in the course of socio-historical development, recorded in the results of practical and cognitive activity of a person, transmitted by socio-cultural means and is the basis of individual and social knowledge at each specific stage of historical development" (Rebane, 1982: 3). Rebane notes that social memory is not a substance, it cannot be interpreted as Popper's "third world". It allocates three large groups of storage media: (1) tools of production and materialized results of labor, often generalized in the concept of "material culture"; (2) objective social relations; (3) language in the broad sense, that is, "natural" languages, their various technical modifications, as well as non-linguistic semiotic means. Lotman developed the semiotic theory of memory, considering the sign and symbol (in contrast to Rebane) as the main structural element, considers the paradigm of memory-oblivion as a cultural universal. "Culture is a collective intelligence and collective memory, that is, a supraindividual mechanism for storing and transmitting certain messages (texts) and developing new ones. In this sense, the space of culture can be defined as the space of some common memory, that is, the space within which some common texts can be preserved and updated" (Lotman, 1992).
In one of the Soviet works, another interesting definition is given: "Social memory is a process carried out by society with the help of special institutions, devices, and means of fixing in a generally meaningful form, systematizing, storing (outside of individual human heads) the theoretically generalized collective experience of humanity, obtained by it in the process of developing science, philosophy, the art of knowledge and imaginative representations of the world. Information stored in books and other means of memory is given out in one way or another for "rewriting" in the memory of an individual" (Kolevatov, 1984: 65). If the European "memory boom" uses the metaphor of individual memory to explain the symbolic side of the life of collectives, then in Russian Soviet thought the metaphor of social memory as a kind of mega computer, library, or artificial intelligence is popular.

Conclusions
The evolution of "memory studies" is a consistent deployment of the program of interdisciplinary synthesis, which initially developed on the basis of the counter steps of sociologists and psychologists to understand the problems of temporality and memory and led in the first half of the XX century to the inclusion of specialists in other disciplines, primarily historians, and the creation of the conceptual apparatus of memory studies. At the second stage of this evolution, starting from the second half of the XX century, there is a psychological turn of memory studies, which is implemented in different ways in national scientific traditions. The psychological turn of memory studies is closely related to the spread of the biographical method in the humanities (including oral history), the achievement uses of German and French psychoanalysis and mnemonics for the development of theoretical and applied memory studies.
In general, this direction of the memory studies evolution can be evaluated ambivalently. On the one hand, it is a manifestation of the general humanization of knowledge and development of scientific interest in a human. On the other hand, in the psychologization of memory studies, one can see the danger of erasing subject-object relations in the process of cognition and closing them in an endlessly repeating hermeneutic circle. We see the way out in the development of a broad program of interdisciplinary research, announced at the first stage of the memory studies evolution, and continued by the Soviet school of cultural studies.