What is Personal History?

A lay description by Zenon KELPER

When Dr. William Theaux restored the Art of Memory in PLAN (PLural ANalysis) for the 20th Century, small groups and larger communities gained an increased ability to recover their memory. But if the members of this evolution benefit from this collective knowledge, it was nonetheless keeping emphasizing on mass-psychology and its global productivity known as Ecology.

Then what is Personal History?

PLAN however was largely inspired by the first century of Psychoanalysis, as well as Personal History, which originates from it. This is how things happened during the 20th Century:

Psychoanalysis was first applied to individuals through their pathologies, but it was an opened book full of normal human psychology. From this knowledge, the relation of the individual with his social milieu was deciphered - and Psychoanalysis moved to its field of natural expansion, which is the collective psychology and its effects on the individual. This development is known as PLAN. Does this mean that individual psychoanalysis was now abandoned, and left obsolete, like an egg shell after the chicken is born?

In fact, individual Psychoanalysis persisted as a new form. The egg became a sea-shell, which can be of beautiful and complex form. It was the coat of normal life, edified by the former analysis of pathology, but revealed as Personal History. Events that we have experienced are like shells in the sea of the passing time. They can be retreived and read, preserved and perpetuated instead of sinking in the abyss.

The precious teaching that Personal History retains from Psychoanalysis is that there are layers of meanders that cover up deeper causes, real agents, more precise and effective memories. A Personal Historian helps the individual to untwine his memory, clean up and restitute the relevant features of his/her life. It can be a story, an event, any aspect that one wants to highlight in the great book of time.