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Hello, as every second passes, humanity has a moment more to remember,

and perhaps this fact alone goes some way to explaining the ever-changing

role of memory both in the mind of individuals and the heart and at the heart of the

body politic. Memory has personal and national implications. Whether we look to Chile, South Africa, Germany or Northern Ireland,

these are all societies where the issue of memory is at the centre of the dilemmas and challenges they face. And for the individual too, as ever more forms of information crowd for space at our minds

and the image from someone else's photograph can be more enduring than our own firsthand

experience of an event, can memory itself forever remain unchanged in its role within our psychology.

Malcolm Bowie is Marshall Fauch Professor of French Literature at Oxford University and also the Director of Oxford European Humanities Research Center.

He's a scholar of Proust, Freud and Lacan, and his most recent book is Proust

Among the Stars.

Dr Nancy Wood is head of media studies at the University of Sussex, where her research is chiefly

in the areas of popular history and memory.

She is the author of Vectors of Memory, which is to be published in September this year.

Marken Bauer, at the start of this century, Freud came up in an idea that had huge impact

on the way that we think about our own past.

He put in memory, I think, right at the heart of where we form ourselves as individuals.

Could you tell us about that?

I could.

I need to begin by sketching out something that he wasn't doing.

He wasn't coming up with a theory of memory in general he wasn't trying to work out the internal

systems that might comprise the neurophysiological functioning of the brain

...