Historical analysis can contribute to the understanding of memory complaints and disorders (e.g. Burnham, 1888–89; Berrios, 1985a, 1990, 1992b, 1995; Bulbena & Berrios, 1986; Levin et al., 1983), particularly if it takes into account their psychiatric dimension. At a surface level, history may identify those current concepts that have developed out of the clinical observation of specific patients. At a deeper level, it can identify the theoretical and social frames within which those observations were made. In general, history will inform the memory researcher of the hidden conceptual stipulations (Edgell, 1924; Schacter, 1982; Simondon, 1982) governing the nosological status of phenomena such as fugues (Hacking, 1996), déjà vu (Berrios, 1995), and the ‘memory failure’ of schizophrenia (Rund, 1988; Kirkpatrick et al., 1986).

Using the criterion of ‘amount of experimental work’, Tulving (1983) called the period before Ebbinghaus the ‘dark ages’ in the history of memory. In the same vein, Hacking (1995) proposed that ‘the sciences of memory were new in the latter part of the nineteenth century’ (p. 198) but as Murray (1976) has shown, memory and its disorders were in fact frequently discussed during and before this period. Interestingly enough, these debates also focused on narratives style, laws of association, and content of memory, features which until recently had been neglected. To be sure, ‘models of memory’ during these earlier periods are different from what Ebbinghaus (1885) was to propose towards the end of the century (e.g. Shakow, 1930; Postman, 1968; Caparrós, 1986), and from what Tulving (1983) would consider as ‘scientific’.