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2 5 6 Jean Piaget
of sensori-motor patterns, such as a habit pattern (therefore the habit itself as
a motor repetition), and even the retention of ‘operative’ patterns (identity,
seriation, etc.), as recollections proper marked by recognition, and so on: we
shall speak in this sense of the ‘psychological memory in the broad sense’. 3)
Lastly, it is possible to use the term ‘psychological memory in the strict sense’
to refer to behaviour involving an explicit reference to the past, the observables
of which are more especially: (a) the recognition or perception of an object that
is present but which has already been perceived, and (b) the recalling by means
of a memory image of an object or an event that is not present, but represented
(by a mental image, a verbal account, etc.), inasmuch as it was known in the
past.
That being said, the (non-hereditary) retention of the past, which is comprised
in varying degrees in the three foregoing meanings, raises in actual fact two very
distinct questions, only the first of which concerns the biologist whereas both
concern the psychologist, the second being closely dependent, however, on the
former. The first question is what may be called pattern retention, Le., thereten-
tion of any organized set of reactions capable of repetition or of applicationto
situations that recur, or even of generalizations in the presence of situations that
are new but similar in some respects to foregoing ones. The second question
concerns only the ‘psychological memory in the strict sense’ and is the reten-
tion of memory images, the fixing and recalling or evocation of which can be
observed, but about which not much is known in between, so that writers like
P. Janet have accepted that recollection is in reality a reconstruction, rather in
the manner in which the historian works (‘the recall’), whereas others like Freud
assume that all memories are stored in the ‘inconscious’ during the period of
retention.
The first of these two questions is independent of the second, while the latter
is in many cases and probably always linked to the former. Concerning the
first of these two points, we would recall that a pattern is the expression of an
activity that is repeated by virtue of a generalization (even if the situations are
identical), whereas a memory involves finding once again, in reality or in
thought, a striking object or event. The retention of the memory thus poses a
special problem, while the retention of patterns is inseparable from their very
existence, and thedurationof such retention dependsentirely on their functioning,
which lasts by self-retention or self-regulation and does not need to be recog-
nized or recalled in the form of particular memories in order to last. It is thus
that the movements inherent in a motor habit, like going downstairs, are re-
tained due to their very organization and that a common intellectual pattern, a
syllogism or an implication, do not have to be evoked by particular memories to
be applied again every time deduction is called for.
This is not to say, of course, that the existence of the patterns does not raise
any problems: but such problems have to do with formation and organization,
and in so far as these can be solved, there is no separate question as regards
their retention except to refer again to the feedbacks or regulations that presided
over such formation, since each operation of the pattern revives its organiza-
tion. There is therefore no memory of patterns, for the memory of a pattern is