Just about ten years ago I wrote the introduction to another collection of essays. Autobiographical Memory was the first edited book dedicated to a topic that has become an expanding area of study: an area that mixes rigorous, controlled, laboratory methods and theory with everyday questions. The time has come to ask what we have learned and what are we likely to learn, and the chapters of this book do that.

Autobiographical memory is one of the oldest and most complex areas of psychological inquiry. It is the presenting problem in most reports of Alzheimer's disease, closed head injury, and memory loss in general. It is the data base of talking-cure psychotherapies. It involves storytelling, group communication, and concepts like the self (Neisser, 1993; Neisser & Fivush, 1994; Srull & Wyer, 1993). It is what we usually mean by the term memory in everyday usage and thus is the basis of many of psychologists' ideas and intuitions about memory in general. Autobiographical memory therefore requires the integration of ideas and data from neuropsychology, clinical psychology, personality theory, social psychology, the study of narrative, folk psychology, and laboratory memory research. Because so many aspects of psychology, as well as other fields, are involved it should have been one of the least tractable areas to study. Nonetheless, in recent years, in large part because of these varied and rich sources of data and theory, cognitive psychology has made surprising advances understanding autobiographical memory.