Generational memory and 20th-century lives

Ideas about memory as the source of human subjectivity developed throughout European liberal democracies in the first half of the 20th century, stimulated by war trauma and universal suffrage. Two archives of memory - psychoanalytic case histories and oral history - reveal the workings of generational memory in the formation of welfare states and social democracy. Generation is understood as people born into similar social environments, coming under similar influences at a particular historical time.