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Book review: The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, & the Mind

much recovered as invented. Both sides in these battles were constituted by victims and their professional enablers. The topic of personal memory had become highly politicized, as historical memory had always been, with law courts and public media functioning as major arenas of conflict. Several of the episodes described in this book also show that memory politics did not provide the only grounds for a convergence between expert and lay ideas about memory. By mid-century, the theories of accredited experts and popular beliefs about memory were both heavily influenced by a pervasive familiarity with the products of widely marketed recording technologies, such as films, amateur photographs and audio recordings. This fact is well documented in the relevant chapters, but one might go further and ask just what made these recording technologies appear so promising as a model for how memory operated. An answer to this question would have to recognize the existence of some general preunderstanding of what memory was. When the technologies came along, there was something about the way they were understood that fitted this cultural template. It was the quality of preserving a copy of a previous reality, a quality that was strongly emphasized in the marketing of these technologies, that seems to have been crucial for this fit. The camera, supposedly, did not lie and, potentially, neither did memory. For key figures in American military psychiatry and nascent neuropsychology, as much as for their lay collaborators, the brain housed fixed records of past experience. As in the case of model recording devices, the faithful reproduction of these records depended on the employment of special technologies, developing film in the one case and the manipulated ‘recovery’ of memories in the other. A contrary view that saw memory as reconstructive rather than reproductive seems to have developed significant traction only in the latter part of the century. It is tempting to point out that this was also a time when techniques for manipulating auditory, textual and visual records were becoming part of everyday life. Such observations are prompted by the historical threads that appear in several chapters of a book whose value lies, not only in the inherent interest of the material it presents so well but also in the opening up of new directions for the exploration of personal memory as a historically situated and socially contextualized topic.