Gladwell and Lewis on transactive memory

I’m currently reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War, about the tension between the ideals of precision bombing and the pragmatic and brutal reality of “area” bombing within the US Army Air Forces. It’s very good so far.

As is his wont, Gladwell includes many interesting asides to buttress his story. Among them is the following:

The psychologist Daniel Wegner has this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation that we don’t just store information in our minds or in specific places. We also store memories and understanding in the minds of the people we love. You don’t need to remember your child’s emotional relationship to her teacher because you know your wife will; you don’t have to remember how to work the remote because you know your daughter will. That’s transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other people’s minds. Wegner has a heartbreaking riff about what one member of a couple will often say when the other one dies—that some part of him or her died along with the partner. That, Wegner says, is literally true. When your partner dies, everything that you have stored in that person’s brain is gone.

“Transactive memory” gives me a term for a phenomenon described quite memorably and movingly by CS Lewis in his 1960 book The Four Loves. Though Gladwell focuses on romantic or spousal relationships (via the modish but vague “partners”), Lewis’s context is a discussion of friendship. The concept applies to both. Lewis:

Lamb says somewhere that if, of three friends (A, B, and C), A should die, then B loses not only A but “A’s part in C,” which C loses not only A but “A’s part in B.” In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him “to myself” now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald. Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say to Dante, “Here comes one who will augment our loves.” For in this love “to divide is not to take away.” Of course the scarcity of kindred souls—not to mention practical considerations about the size of rooms and the audibility of voices—set limits to the enlargement of the circle; but within those limits we possess each friend not less but more as the number of those with whom we share him increases.

Is there any more wonderful mystery than friendship? “Transactive memory” names just another facet of the way, through relationship, mere individuals enrich each other.

By the way, the “Charles” and “Ronald” in the passage from Lewis are not substitutes for Tom, Dick, and Harry but real people—Charles Williams and JRR Tolkien, members with Lewis of the writers’ group the Inklings. Charles Williams died suddenly in 1945 at the age of 58, unexpectedly reducing the Inklings by one.