No trace beyond their name? Affective memories, a forgotten concept

It seems natural to think that emotional experiences associated with a memory of a past event are new and present emotional states triggered by the remembered event. This common conception was nonetheless challenged at the beginning of the twentieth century by intellectuals who considered that emotions can be encoded and retrieved, and that emotional aspects linked to memories of the personal past need not necessarily be new emotional responses caused by the act of recollection. They called these specific kinds of memories “affective memories” and defended their existence. My aim here is to expound both the historical background of this debate, as well as the characterization and development of the notion of affective memory since its first inception. I aim to show that although the debate was left unresolved and the term disappeared from the academic landscape around 1930, many of the characterizations of the nature of emotions and memory advanced by the advocates of affective memory have implicitly reappeared in the scientific agenda and been further developed in recent decades.