Forgetting

About this book

Ahmed Fouad Al-Ahwani asks whether forgetting is a failure of memory or one of the mind's necessary forms of protection. The study moves through attention, recognition, childhood amnesia, dreams, unconscious processes, delirium, and disorders that disturb the continuity of identity. Everyday puzzles—remembering a face but losing a name, or waking without a sense of elapsed time—open onto philosophical questions about how the past constructs the present. Memory gives life coherence, yet total recall could make adaptation impossible. Al-Ahwani presents forgetting as an active psychological process that filters experience, sometimes mercifully and sometimes destructively, and invites readers to reconsider the apparent emptiness where recollection disappears.