Understood as a psychological phenomenon, there has been very little discussion of cryptomnesia in the philosophical literature. Cryptomnesia presents us with a strange phenomenon in which we take ourselves to be imagining, but the thought or idea that we entertain actually involves remembered content. In this paper, we argue for a three-factor account of cryptomnesia, according to which it is a mnemonic phenomenon that involves imagination. We provide an account of both the ‘mnemonic’ and ‘imaginative’ aspects of (...) cryptomnesia in terms of the attitude, the content, and the metacognitive processes involved in those states. In addition, we show how our three-factor account is better suited to account for cryptomnesia than competing philosophical theories of episodic memory. We conclude by discussing how the three-factor account sheds light on a range of other mnemonic and imaginative phenomena. (shrink)

At the turn of the last century C.G. Jung began his career as a psychiatrist. During the next decade, three men whose names are famous in the annals of medical psychology influenced his professional development: Pierre Janet, under whom he studied at the Sappetriere Hospital in Paris; Eugen Bleuler, his chief at the Burgholzli Mental Hospital in Zurick; and Sigmund Frued, whom Jung met in 1907. It is Bleuler, and to a lesser extent Janet, whose influence is to be found (...) in the descriptive experimental psychiatry composing Volume I of the _Collected Works_. These papers appeared between 1902 and 1905l most of them are now being published in English for the first time. The volume opens with Jung's dissertation for the medical degree: 'On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena', a study that foreshadows much of his later work, and as such is indispensable to all serious students of his work. It is the detailed analysis of the case of an hysterical adolescent girl who professed to be a medium. The volume also includes papers on cryptomnesia, hysterical parapraxes in reading, manic mood disorder, simulated insanity, and other subjects. (shrink)

Introduction: silence and secrecy -- Symptoms -- Cryptography -- Cryptomnesia -- Fact or fiction -- Cryptosemiotician -- Tentative conclusion -- Appendix: list of coded passages from Wittgenstein's Nachlass.

English summary: In "Also Spoke Zarathustra," Nietzsche referred to, considerably more than in his other writings, the sum-total of the western tradition and condensed within it our cultural heritage in a stupendous synthesis, which he configured in a curious space of citations, parodies, and echoes. Already the colorful singularity makes the text an important bearer and filter of tradition and a model case, on which literary and philosophical approaches, confronted with the question of cultural memory and Nietzsche's reassessment of it, (...) are able to mutually compliment and illuminate each other. This anthology documents a spectrum of possible avenues into Nietzsche's chief work, into his characteristic dynamic of recreation, and to the specific forms in which he actualized the compression of western tradition in "Zarathustra." The pathos of "Zarathustra," Nietzsche's parody, and the concept of cryptomnesia (the forgotten memory), in which the transvaluation of tradition is placed within the horizon of productive forgetting, are therefore special challenges for literary studies as well as the thinking of the present. German description: In 'Also sprach Zarathustra' bezieht sich Nietzsche weit mehr als in anderen Schriften auf den Fundus der abendlandischen Uberlieferung und verdichtet mithin unser kulturelles Erbe in einer riesigen Synthese, die sich als eigentumlicher Spielraum von Zitaten, Parodien und Anklangen konfiguriert. Gerade die schillernde Singularitat dieser Synthese macht den Text zu einem bedeutenden Trager und Filter der Tradition und somit zu einem Modellfall, an dem sich literaturwissenschaftliche und philosophische Zugangsweisen, die sich mit der Frage nach dem kulturellen Gedachtnis und dessen Umwertungspraxis bei Nietzsche konfrontieren, erganzen und gegenseitig beleuchten konnen. Der Sammelband dokumentiert ein Spektrum moglicher Zugange zu Nietzsches Hauptwerk, zu seiner charakteristischen Dynamik der Neuschopfung und zu den spezifischen Formen, in denen sich die Verdichtung der Tradition im 'Zarathustra' artikuliert. Das Pathos Zarathustras, Nietzsches Parodie und der Kryptomnesie-Begriff, der die Umwertung der Tradition in den Horizont eines produktiven Vergessens stellt, werden dabei zu besonderen Herausforderungen der Literaturwissenschaft sowie des Denkens der Gegenwart. (shrink)