The extended body: vicarious memories and mimetic capacities in transgenerational PTSD
Philosophy of Science Colloquium
The Institute Vienna Circle holds a Philosophy of Science Colloquium with talks by our present fellows.
Date: 23/11/2023
Time: 15h00
Venue: New Institute Building (NIG), Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien, SR 2H
Abstract:
The present communication claims that cases of vicarious memories (i.e. memories we have from other people's experiences) do not represent a challenge to embodied causation, but it logically allows a notion of extended body according to which a past experience need not be my own in order to trigger a memory. As it happened indeed, that still serves as a cause for remembering. This is observable in cases of transgenerational PTSD. The core idea is that the body is not one's own entirely but a sort of bridge to the world in which the environment and different bodies are brought together in a sort of unity (Cf. Trigg, 2019). Naturalizing the idea of an extended body seems plausible if distributed and enactive remembering explore how intersubjectivity leads to new identities or rather blurs a clear border between who I am and who you are if both are in constant exchange. A dyadic personal relationship is translated into intercorporeal autonomous systems, as what is at stake here are not two individuals containing individual memories, but rather a collective shape of those by emotional attunement. Indeed, neural processes of sensorimotor and emotional dispositions overlap with perceptual emotional processes (Werning, 2020), which goes hand in hand with phenomenology's account of embodied resonance (Gallese and Siniglagia, 2018; Geniusas, 2022). Based on simulation studies from the 80's, embodied views of simulation explain not only how we mirror actions, but also emotion and sensation. This could be claimed to trigger reenactment in collective remembering. I then show how mimetic capacities are a gain from evolution that allows perfectioning skills and living in a society not through what is genetically inherited but through what is learned in interaction (Donald, 2001). Emotional synchronization and imitation are normally studied through the relation between children and their parents in a similar direction than that of Fuchs (2012) when he claims the habitual progression of such a contact leads to internalized bodily postures and knowledge in the child. This leads to a structure of shared emotions that has an identity which will enhance memory mutually (Cf. Teves, 2016). Applying the idea to memory and cognitive systems, I finally construct the possibility that this makes a subject simulate another person's personal memories as one's own through mimicked embodied appraisals. If this is plausible, that explains how sociological cases of transgenerational collective trauma make descendants of disaster survivors - such as the Shoah - undergo the same psychopathologies as their elderly family members through indirect experiences of events with a negative valence.