Fairy Note

Reverse Forgetting: Confabulation, Latent Inheritance, and the Reconstruction of Narrative Identity

(Aleph)

This note emerges from an unexpected convergence between several strands already active within Phantom Mirror: dementia, confabulation, psychoanalytic mourning, phenomenological worldhood, distributed cognition, and the retrospective activation of the archive. What initially appeared to be a separate autobiographical revelation, the discovery of concealed Jewish ancestry through a family DNA test, gradually revealed itself as structurally continuous with the central concerns of the PhD. The significance of the event does not lie primarily in ethnicity, nor in the politics of identity categories, but in the destabilisation of autobiographical coherence produced by the sudden insertion of a previously absent symbolic fact into an already functioning life narrative.

The most immediate and striking intuition was the sensation that this experience functioned as a kind of “reverse dementia.” This phrase is not intended clinically, but structurally and phenomenologically. Dementia involves the progressive dissolution of memory structures that once stabilised identity and worldhood. In Phantom Mirror, Lolly’s experience repeatedly demonstrates this collapse. The house remains physically present, but no longer coheres as home. William remains physically present, but no longer coheres as husband. The phenomenological grounding that once organised experience begins to fail. Under these conditions, the psyche attempts to restore coherence through confabulation. The “holiday let,” the “replica house,” the “other Cambridge,” and “Fake William” are not arbitrary fantasies. They are compensatory structures generated to stabilise an impossible perceptual contradiction. The psyche cannot indefinitely inhabit the proposition that something both is and is not itself. Confabulation therefore functions not as deception, but as emergency narrative repair.

This structure bears an unexpected resemblance to contemporary AI systems. Large language models similarly attempt to preserve coherence under conditions of informational incompleteness. When gaps appear in a sequence, the system generates the statistically most probable continuation. The AI “hallucinates” because its architecture is fundamentally organised around predictive completion. It cannot tolerate unresolved fragmentation within the chain of output. The hallucination is therefore not a malfunction external to the system but a direct consequence of its coherence-producing logic. The same dynamic appears, albeit phenomenologically rather than statistically, within dementia. The mind fills gaps because identity and worldhood depend upon continuity.

What became newly visible through the DNA revelation was that autobiographical identity may itself function through comparable acts of compensatory narrative maintenance. Prior to the discovery, the self-narrative was relatively stable. Family history, ancestry, and symbolic belonging had already sedimented into an ordinary autobiographical structure. The revelation introduced a new fragment that retrospectively destabilised that structure. Suddenly the past reorganised itself. Photographs that once appeared ordinary acquired latent meanings. Family silences became charged. Earlier emotional atmospheres became newly legible. The archive itself had not changed materially, yet its symbolic organisation transformed entirely.

This distinction is crucial. The photographs did not reveal their meaning at the moment they were taken. Rather, the revelation altered the interpretive architecture through which the images were read. The archive became active retrospectively. This resembles Walter Benjamin’s formulation that memory does not emerge through calm historical reconstruction, but “flashes up at a moment of danger.” In this sense, the DNA revelation functioned as a disruptive present condition that suddenly rendered the archive legible in a new way. Meaning appeared not progressively, but explosively.

This retrospective activation aligns strongly with Victor Burgin’s concept of the psychic object. The psychic object does not derive its force from stable materiality but from its capacity to reorganise psychic relations. The family photographs became psychic objects not because they changed visually, but because they became newly entangled with unconscious and symbolic structures. The image therefore functions less as documentation than as delayed psychic activation. The archive becomes a latent field awaiting retrospective recognition.

The psychoanalytic implications are equally significant. Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia describes mourning as a crisis in which the ego must repeatedly reorganise itself around the absence of the lost object. The object does not simply disappear externally; rather, “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego.” Identity itself becomes unstable because the object had already structured the self. Mourning therefore involves continual acts of reconstitution, re-testing, and narrative repair. In dementia, this process becomes tragically visible because the structures that once stabilised selfhood disintegrate from within.

Yet the DNA revelation introduces a strange reversal of Freud’s structure. The destabilisation arises not through loss alone, but through retrospective addition. The object was not absent in reality, but hidden symbolically. The revelation therefore produces not straightforward recovery but narrative turbulence. The self must now renegotiate its own continuity in relation to a previously concealed fragment. The result is not stable recognition but recursive reinterpretation. Earlier memories, family stories, and emotional atmospheres begin to reorganise themselves around the newly introduced fact.

Importantly, this process should not be pathologised. The autobiographical self is not becoming delusional in the clinical sense. Rather, the psyche is attempting to restore continuity under conditions of symbolic rupture. What emerges is not confabulation proper, but a heightened awareness that identity itself depends upon ongoing acts of narrative synthesis. The revelation exposes the ordinarily invisible labour through which the self maintains coherence over time.

This is where the relation to AI phototherapy becomes particularly important. The significance of AI is not that it possesses consciousness or emotional understanding. Rather, AI externalises and accelerates coherence-generating processes already present within human cognition and artistic practice. Joanna Zylinska’s account of “image thinking” becomes crucial here. Human beings have always thought through externalisation: gesture, drawing, photography, writing, montage, and symbolic arrangement all function as cognitive scaffolds. Barbara Tversky’s work on gesture and spatial cognition similarly demonstrates that thinking is distributed across bodily movement, image production, and environmental interaction rather than confined to internal linguistic representation.

What changes with generative AI is not the existence of image-thinking itself, but the collapse of temporal distance between language, image, and revision. AI phototherapy produces a recursive loop in which symbolic associations externalise almost immediately through visual generation. Language becomes image with unprecedented speed. Refusal, recognition, revision, and projection accelerate into a continuous cognitive exchange. The AI therefore functions not as a conscious partner, but as a new cognitive infrastructure through which latent structures become visible.

This is why the emerging Sizewell postcard archive unexpectedly becomes relevant to the broader PhD. The workshop demonstrates that non-AI artistic practices already operate through distributed acts of autobiographical externalisation. Participants move between writing, memory, photography, colour, place, and emotional association in ways remarkably close to the dynamics of AI phototherapy. The postcard becomes a fragmentary psychic trace: a small unit of memory and perception whose meaning exceeds deliberate intention. When accumulated collectively, the postcards generate emergent patterns that no individual participant could fully anticipate. In this sense, the archive itself begins to resemble a distributed cognitive field.

The important distinction, however, is embodiment. AI systems statistically synthesise patterns without lived experience. Human archives emerge from embodied temporality, grief, memory, displacement, and attachment. The structural resemblance between AI completion and autobiographical reconstruction should therefore not collapse the difference between computational systems and human subjectivity. Rather, the comparison illuminates how deeply human cognition itself depends upon acts of narrative and symbolic completion.

What ultimately emerges through this strand of thinking is a broader understanding of Phantom Mirror. The project is no longer solely concerned with memory loss in dementia. It increasingly becomes an investigation into the unstable architectures through which identity is continually maintained, repaired, fragmented, and reconstructed under conditions of rupture. Dementia dissolves coherence through forgetting. Reverse forgetting destabilises coherence through revelation. Both expose the fragile narrative systems through which the self sustains continuity over time.

The phantom mirror therefore reflects not only loss, but the unstable labour of autobiographical reconstruction itself.

Appendix

Latent Inheritance, Family Silence, and the Retrospective Archive

The theoretical reflections developed in Reverse Forgetting emerged from a specific autobiographical and archival event that unexpectedly destabilised my understanding of family history, identity, and memory. Although this material does not form the central subject of the PhD, it provides important contextual grounding for the concepts of retrospective recognition, narrative reconstruction, latent inheritance, and the unstable relationship between archive and identity that recur throughout Phantom Mirror.

The revelation began through a family DNA test undertaken by my aunt, without my direct involvement or consent. The results confirmed long-suspected Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry within the maternal side of the family. What followed was not simply the discovery of genealogical information, but the retrospective activation of an entire family archive that suddenly became newly legible.

My grandmother’s family name was Funk, a recognisably Ashkenazi Jewish surname. Approximately two centuries earlier, the family appears to have converted to Catholicism, likely as part of the long history of Jewish assimilation and survival strategies within Eastern Europe. The more precise historical term may be “conversion” or “Catholicisation” rather than assimilation proper, though the exact details remain historically unclear. By the twentieth century, the family outwardly existed entirely within Catholic Polish society. My grandmother’s middle name was Christina, and her mother was called Maria, both names strongly signalling Catholic identity within Poland.

Yet beneath this surface lay a concealed history of Jewish ancestry that appears to have remained psychologically and culturally active despite formal religious conversion. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, even second- and third-generation converted families could still be identified, persecuted, denounced, or dispossessed under racial definitions of Jewishness. Conversion offered no real protection from fascist racial categorisation.

My grandmother left Poland shortly before or during the outbreak of the Second World War, first travelling through Palestine and later escaping through Alexandria and Egypt. She eventually married an Englishman and settled permanently in Britain. Her trajectory reflects a broader history of wartime displacement, exile, and reconstitution that shaped many European families after the collapse of pre-war cosmopolitan Europe.

The family losses were severe. Her sister was shot during the war. Her mother is believed to have died in bombing, possibly in Warsaw or Minsk, although the details remain uncertain. Her father, a physician or medical professional, had already died before these events. Much remains fragmented, uncertain, or partially obscured, which itself becomes significant within the conceptual framework of the project.

One of the most striking aspects of my grandmother’s life was the contradiction between her intellectual sophistication and her later emotional conservatism. As a woman studying at the University of Lausanne during the 1930s, she belonged to a highly unusual and progressive generation of educated European women. Yet after the war she appears to have responded to trauma, displacement, and concealment through rigidity, emotional closure, and intense conservatism. Living later in Windsor, she became highly socially conservative while simultaneously pushing her children toward elite intellectual achievement, eventually helping guide them into Oxford and other highly educated environments.

The emotional atmosphere produced by this concealment appears, retrospectively, to have profoundly shaped the family system. Although no explicit “secret” was discussed openly, the family often functioned through emotional suppression, avoidance, and guardedness. Looking back, it now feels as though an unnamed historical pressure structured the emotional life of the household. The mother was concealing something fundamental, not simply biographically but existentially, and this concealment gradually produced a wider emotional shutdown across generations.

What became newly visible after the DNA revelation was not merely ancestry itself, but the retrospective coherence of previously disconnected emotional fragments. Family photographs, stories, silences, anxieties, and behaviours reorganised themselves into a new pattern. The archive had not materially changed, yet its symbolic meaning altered completely. This retrospective activation forms one of the key conceptual foundations for the notion of “reverse forgetting” developed in the accompanying Fairy Note.

Importantly, my own emotional response to the revelation was deeply conflicted. I experienced anger, destabilisation, fear, confusion, and resistance rather than uncomplicated identification or celebration. Part of this arose from the sense that the revelation had occurred without my consent through technological systems that suddenly reorganised autobiographical identity after the fact. The DNA test functioned as a contemporary technological apparatus of retrospective recognition, forcing latent fragments into visibility.

At the same time, contemporary political conditions complicated the experience further. The discovery occurred during a period marked by renewed global antisemitism, the rise of nationalist politics, and widespread confusion between Jewish identity, Zionism, Israeli state violence, ethnicity, religion, and historical persecution. These contemporary tensions made the revelation feel emotionally unstable rather than culturally reassuring. Rather than producing belonging, the discovery intensified questions around identity, inheritance, historical trauma, and symbolic affiliation.

The result was not a stable new identity category, but a heightened awareness of how fragile and constructed autobiographical continuity may be. The revelation exposed the degree to which personal identity depends upon incomplete archives, inherited silences, and narrative coherence maintained across generations.

Within the broader context of Phantom Mirror, this appendix therefore functions not as a declaration of identity but as contextual grounding for several recurring theoretical concerns:

• retrospective recognition
• latent archives
• confabulation and coherence
• unstable autobiographical structures
• inherited trauma
• fragmented memory
• delayed symbolic activation
• and the reconstruction of identity under conditions of rupture.

The archive becomes newly visible only after the conditions of recognition have changed. In this sense, the family photograph, like the psychic snapshot, functions as a latent image whose meaning emerges only retrospectively, after the symbolic structure surrounding it has been reorganised.