Vital memory and affect: Living with a difficult past, by Steven D Brown and Paula Reavey. London: Routledge, 2015

How can memories of past experiences define so much who we are, or bound us to a place, or cause eternal grief, or suddenly lose their grip on our lives and vanish in the limbo of our past?
In ‘‘Vital memory and affect,’’ Steven D Brown and Paula Reavey (2015) propose an original reconceptualization of memory that allows to account for what they call ‘‘vital memories,’’ that is, ‘‘memory that are in some way fundamental to a sense of who we are as persons’’ (p. xiii). They propose a model of memory as located in the flow of time and as complex configuration of affects, relationships, images and material things, socioculturally situated. Because this model has much to do with current attempts to account for complex modalities of experiencing from a cultural psychological perspective, I wish to briefly summarize that work, before showing its possible prolongations.