What is the disease of memory loss called?

Théodule Ribot, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Théodule Ribot answers

The condition you are asking about is what I call amnesia — the dissolution of memory in its various forms, from the partial to the total. What matters far more than the name, however, is the order in which amnesia proceeds, for that order reveals a law. The failing memory first loses its hold upon recent events — a fact so common that it passes almost unnoticed.¹

Then, as dissolution advances, intellectual acquisitions disappear little by little: the technique of learned professions, command of foreign languages, personal recollections descending ever further toward the past, with the experiences of childhood the last to go.² The emotional faculties are effaced more slowly still, for feelings are the most profound and tenacious of all phases of mental activity, the immediate expression of organic life itself.³

What survives longest is almost entirely organic — the routine of daily life, habits long contracted, the capacity to dress, to eat, to perform manual tasks, while judgment and will have already gone.⁴ The name, then, is the least of it. What the clinic teaches is that amnesia is not a random ruin but a dissolution that follows a law — the new perishes before the old, the complex before the simple.⁵

Sources

1. It is a fact of such common experience that the failing memory first loses its hold upon recent events that the anomaly is unobserved.

   Diseases of Memory

2. Intellectual acquisitions—the technique of science and art, professional knowledge, the command of foreign languages—disappear little by little. Personal recollections are obliterated, descending toward the past. Those of infancy are the last to disappear.

   Diseases of Memory

3. The most careful observers have remarked that the emotional faculties are effaced much more slowly than the intellectual faculties... feelings are the most profound, the most common, and the most tenacious of all phases of mental activity.

   Diseases of Memory

4. Those acquisitions which are the last to succumb are almost entirely organic, such as the routine of daily life and habits long contracted. Many are able to arise, dress themselves, take their meals regularly... while possessing neither judgment, will, nor affections.

   Diseases of Memory

5. We have stated these two facts in the dissolution of memory: the new perishes before the old, the complex before the simple. The law which we have formulated is only the psychological expression of a law of life.

   Diseases of Memory