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The Role Of Psychogenic Amnesia In Pandora Hearts

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Introduction In the Japanese manga series Pandora Hearts, author Jun Mochizuki tackles themes of identity, memory loss, trauma, and how our relationships affect how we define ourselves. Notably, multiple characters in the story have some form of amnesia and lack memories of who they were and what their lives were like. For two characters in particular, Alice and Gilbert, their lack of memories plays a large role in their goals and character development throughout the story. Alice wants to try to recover her memories, but she does not see regaining her memories as necessary for the development and understanding of her identity. Comparatively, Gilbert actively tries to avoid regaining his memories out of fear that it will change his current …show more content…

Psychogenic amnesia is also known as dissociative amnesia and functional amnesia; for consistency, this paper will refer to this phenomenon as psychogenic amnesia (MacDonald & MacDonald, 2009). Lack of memory for autobiographical and episodic events is the most common, but some patients also experience impairments in recall of personal semantic facts and non-personal semantic knowledge (Staniloiu & Markowitsch, 2012). Psychogenic amnesia is thought to be an impairment in the retrieval of memories rather than encoding. It is likely a result of blocked access to memories that are still stored, but no longer accessible due to dysfunction of the brain structures and mechanisms involved in memory retrieval (MacDonald & Macdonald, 2009; Rathbone et al., …show more content…

He lives on his family’s estate with his sister, his uncle, and his friend and valet Gilbert. At the start of the story, Oz is about to have his coming-of-age ceremony to be officially inducted into noble society. However, at the ceremony, things go awry when members of a mysterious faction called the Baskervilles appear and wreak havoc. In the midst of the chaos, the Baskervilles “pass judgment” on Oz and banish him to the Abyss for “the sin of his existence,” which Oz knows nothing about. Now stuck in the Abyss, Oz meets a girl who has lost her memories. All she knows is that her name is Alice and that she woke up in the Abyss one day with no memories of anything before that. However, she also knows that the reason she’s missing her memories is because they had been taken from her, and her primary goal for most of the series is to find her memories. In the art of Pandora Hearts, her memory is visually depicted as a piece of paper that has been torn apart and had its pieces scattered. These “pieces” are located in different objects and places, and by coming into contact with it, Alice is able to remember a fragment of her

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