The impetus for this book is the belief that a comprehensive description of autobiographical memory in both form and function must be an eclectic, interdisciplinary endeavour. Unlike cognitive and experimental psychologists, who have conducted most of their work in laboratories and have been concerned with rote memory tasks, Ross looks at motivation and emotion as components of human memory and assembles a diverse body of sources that have heretofore been ignored by psychologists in their study of memory. He organizes his discussions along three lines of inquiry: (1) the subjective or experimental dimension of autobiographical memory, (2) the early development and later recall of childhood memories, and (3) social, historical, and folkloric perspectives on autobiographical retention. Rich and original scope, this work calls on the names of James, Titchener, Freud, Piaget, Baldwin, Janet, Proust, Sartre, Bergson, Russell, Strauss, and Merleau-Ponty, among others, to broaden our current understanding of the experience of autobiographical memory.
