Disintering Childhood Memory

Disinter/est is a multimedia artwork by British artist, Joshua Sofaer. In this project, Sofaer investigates childhood memory: how one accesses it as an adult, how much of it is recoverable and in what sense, and what the consequences are of how and what we remember. Of interest for our class is how Sofaer makes use of Freudian method and theory. His work literalizes one of Freud's master metaphors---the psychoanalytic method as an archeological dig, as well as appropriating and recreating various bits of Freudian theory---the Father as Oedipal authority, the figure of the Mother in the fort / da game, for example.

Also of interest is the way Sofaer enlisted his sister as co-rememberer, co-creator in his project, suggesting that childhood memory is more a collective then individual creation.

Sofaer's work, then, is of interest for our discussions of childhood, memory and narrative; something relevant to H and even more central to our next literary text, Alison Bechdel's recreation of family history, Fun Home. Sofaer writes about the place of narrative, psychoanalysis and archeology in his work:

"Autobiography necessitates an experiential narrative, one that is predicated on introspection. The prevalence of psychoanalytic models for the understanding of infancy has resulted in a generic conception of the ‘autobiography’ of early childhood in terms of psychoanalytic tropes. As infancy precedes established long term memory, we can not access our own history with the same kinds of hindsight formulation that we would our later childhood, adolescence or young adult life. This mysterious era that is both of ourselves and of other lends itself to a rethinking of the relationship between self and autobiography...

Archaeologists are interested in investigating the material world and using it to explore the past. Until recently, however, children have rarely figured in archaeological interpretations, although the study of children has important repercussions for how we understand communities...

The children of our study (ourselves) have changed out of all recognition. To all intents and purposes they no longer exist. Rather than being more easily accessible than prehistoric remains - the material remnants of lives in millennia gone by - the subjects under study we are dealing with lack any material form in a traditional archaeological sense. In our case, the human remains are currently sitting at a computer terminal typing away, and are completely transformed. Nor do we have any memory, real or imagined, of the period under investigation. So by using archaeology as a model, we are not exploring the individual self, but constructing the past through a process of categorisation. We are not searching for self in the sense of uncovering past individuals but using elements of the life histories of given people (who in a sense might as well be anyone, not necessarily us) to think about the auto-graphic of childhood."