ABSTRACT
Psychologists like Neisser and Rubin became interested in autobiographical memory to understand what happens to historical memories over long periods of time. They would ask subjects to recall, for instance, where they were when they learned President Kennedy was shot. My own interest was to understand the personality aspects of autobiographical memory. Neisser and Rubin were interested in directed memories that had importance to them. I was interested in spontaneous memories that had importance to my clients. I realized that the memories I was interested in preserved metaphorical “as if” ways of perceiving that impacted how present experiences were perceived. My goal was to try to extract and describe the “mechanism” used by my client and try to see the world as he did. How to describe that mechanism? See Chapter 5 for a fuller account.
