What follows is a transcript of two sessions with Mr. A., edited to protect his anonymity and to delete extraneous ramblings. These sessions are the data. Background literature and theoretical speculations may be found in the footnotes.

Mr. A. said he had had a head injury from a bad traffic accident, followed by a very long period of posttraumatic amnesia. His continuous memory had not returned for almost a year, and that had been almost 3 years ago. What he really wanted was to remember events of personal importance to him that had happened before the accident, but whether weeks or months before he did not know. The method of seeking autobiographical memories in association with cue words led him on a fishing expedition in oblivion.

Mr. A.: I want to know if everything I've been told is true. Some of the stuff interests me.

E. (Examiner): Now, you said there was a particular episode in the retrograde amnesia period you wanted to remember. Do you want to talk about that at all?

Mr. A.: It's just that my brother and I were trying to build something, and there was supposed to be a day when we had figured out how to get it to work. I'm curious about how we had solved the problem, what that day was like. It's blank in my memory.