History and Memory....
Memory is creative, reconstructed
A process
Memory is fused with imagination
Physical trace in your mind
Structure that connects one brain cell to another

The ability to create new memories, store them for periods of time, and recall them when they are needed allows us to learn and interact. The study of human memory has been a subject of science, history and philosophy for thousands of years and has become one of the major topics of interest within cognitive psychology. But what exactly is memory? How are memories formed?

Maurice Halbwachs main thesis is that personal memory is always inscribed into, and made possible by, a collective memory. Thus a personal recollection of events is only possible within the common activity of remembering, retrieving, and interpreting past events, which frames the individual recollection. History for Halbwachs is an account of past events that are understood as significant and hence occupy an important place in the memory of people. Thus a historical memory has to be appropriated by an individual memory, which has to be first established within a collective memory.
Halbwachs' primary thesis is that human memory can only function within a collective context. Collective memory, Halbwachs asserts, is always selective; various groups of people have different collective memories, which in turn give rise to different modes of behaviour. Halbwachs shows, for example, how pilgrims to the Holy Land over the centuries evoked very different images of the events of Jesus' life, and how working class constructions of reality differ from those of their middle-class counterparts.
I thus think that collective memory is internal whereas historical memory is external. This is because there is one history and many collective memories, which stays within the limits of a group and is always fragmented, whereas history places itself outside and beyond particular groups. And that collective memory is present not only in texts but much more in oral communication and in shared practises.
On Pierre Nora’s account history is opposed to memory as memory for her is private, spontaneous, represents life and is a phenomenon of the present. History on the contrary is a social science that is a cognitive scheme and comes with a rational reconstruction of the past.
Collingwood also expresses his notion that memory is not history because history is a certain kind of organized or inferential knowledge and memory is not inferential at all. Memory is just a stock of loosely related images that they by themselves do not have much value for history.
I thus want to say that memory is of and about the past. The past is nothing but the memory of the past. It is thus the memory that restates, rethinks and relives the past. Memory is not engraved in stone but is always prone to change, intentionally and non intentionally by a process called forgetting.

Memory is never boring, but it can be painful or traumatic, thus we repress it in Freudian terms. We thus say that the work of memory is similar to the work of imagination. We therefore think it important to abandon to opposition between individual memory and collective memory. This is important to understand because individual memory always works within the framework of collective memory with its practices of remembering things of the past. And it is collective memory only that can be modified and adjusted, thus live off and through individual memory.