The New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute is in a very formal European style building

on a quiet side street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Oak tables, high ceilings, in the library long ribbons of leather-bound volumes, and

five different buss of Sigmund Freud all in a row.

I went there to meet with the society's president, Michelle Press, a psychoanalyst herself,

without lovely quality of patience and openness the best therapists always have.

I wanted to talk with her about a subject that I've always found deeply interesting, what

Freud called para-praxis.

But not just anyone's para-praxis.

The King's Para-praxis.

My name is Malcolm Gladwell.

You're listening to revisionist history, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

After the first two episodes on memory earlier this season, I decided to do a third.

It involves an odyssey.

This odyssey took me from the pages of the handbook of psychobiography to a shrine in Tennessee,

to the legendary battery studios in Times Square and to the hushed offices of the New York

Psychoanalytic Society, where I sat with Michelle Press in search of an answer to a simple

question.

What if a singer couldn't remember the words to a song?

A song hit song a thousand times, particular parts of the song, the same part of the song

over and over.

What would that tell us about the singer?

...