ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with some everyday memory anomalies experienced routinely by normal people; they are puzzling to the individual but so commonplace as to evoke little discussion. Also to be considered are some classical psychogenic phenomena such as déjà vu and depersonalization. These have been meticulously documented in the psychiatric literature, but that does not mean that they are associated exclusively with mental illness. On the contrary, although they may occur only rarely in any given individual’s lifetime, they seem to be experienced in some degree by the majority of normal people. They have been described by many writers, from Dostoyevsky to Oscar Wilde. Yet psychologists have tended to avoid both groups of phenomena. Memory disturbances associated with brain damage have always attracted the interest of experimental psychologists, but their psychogenic counterparts are rarely to be found indexed in textbooks of general, experimental, or cognitive psychology. Clinicians have discussed some of the classical phenomena but in terms of motivational or psychoanalytic theories. Occasionally, psychogenic memory anomalies have been described and discussed in cognitive terms (e.g., in an excellent little book by Talland, 1968). But with the exception of one attempt by the present writer (Reed, 1972), there has been no systematic analysis using a cognitive or information-processing approach.
