Maurice Halbwachs on dreams and memory

In his 1925 book Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (The Social Frameworks of Memory), the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) developed a sustained comparison between remembering and dreaming. Drawing on a new first full English translation of this material, this chapter assesses Halbwachs’ critique of individualism about memory, his scientifically-informed analysis of dream experience, and his ambitious program for a sociological psychology. In work relevant both to contemporary dream science and to approaches to memory inspired by distributed and 4E cognitive theory, Halbwachs argues that dreaming is a natural experiment that tests the cognitive powers of the isolated brain, and that its fragmentary nature confirms that social frameworks are necessary for rich memory experience. Remembering is an activity that involves significant cognitive work in context. Having rejected individualism, Halbwachs offers a more subtle account of dreams as retaining some minimal orientation to society, space, and time. In sharp contrast to prevailing assumptions that Halbwachs ignored individual psychology, his intriguing account of dreams and his social ontology of memory offer rich materials for contemporary integrative approaches to dreaming and remembering across the social and the cognitive sciences.