The psychoanalytical investigation of memory: a subversion of subjectivity
In the “Preliminary Communication” that serves as an introduction to his 1895 essay Studies on Hysteria, Sigmund Freud famously stated that “hysterics mainly suffer from reminiscences,” thus inaugurating an examination of the nature of memory. An archaeology enthusiast, Freud set out to explore the...
Wedi'i Gadw mewn:
| Cyhoeddwyd yn: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/lexis, |
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| Prif Awdur: | |
| Fformat: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Iaith: | Anglais |
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Lexis
2025
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| Pynciau: | |
| Mynediad Ar-lein: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Crynodeb: | In the “Preliminary Communication” that serves as an introduction to his 1895 essay Studies on Hysteria, Sigmund Freud famously stated that “hysterics mainly suffer from reminiscences,” thus inaugurating an examination of the nature of memory. An archaeology enthusiast, Freud set out to explore the lasting traces and remains of his patients’ experiences through anamnesis. He followed a path that was laid out for him – sometimes much to his surprise – by his analysands’ words. In the course of such a pioneering discovery of the Unconscious, the meaning of memory was radically altered.This article proposes to retrace the most significant steps in the psychoanalytical exploration of memory and its neighbouring territory: oblivion. Drawing on groundbreaking texts by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, I seek to demonstrate that the semantic spaces covered by these two notions have been radically redefined by psychoanalysis, eventually transforming the coordinates of human experience. In other words, the reality of what Lacan referred to as the “speakingbeing” is deeply affected by memory, to the point of being determined by it. What is more, remembering does not only proceed from an act of will but on the contrary regularly faces all manner of resistances.The psychoanalytical exploration of memory starts at the sickbed and thus builds upon the study of clinical cases (kline is in fact the Greek word “bed”). A neurologist, Freud was indeed fascinated by his French colleague Jean-Martin Charcot’s hysteric patients. Like many of his peers, he was exposed to hypnosis and attended Charcot’s clinical presentations of hysterics at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. But the journey really began when he returned to Vienna and decided to overcome his fascination. From then on, he would not only watch those patients but actually listen to what they had to say once they lay on the couch. Faced with a variety of surprising manifestations collected and analysed in his 1901 essay The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (such as forgetting dreams or proper nouns), or confronted with more serious symptoms – from the hysteric’s “conversion reaction” to the “repetition compulsion” of the traumatized individual – Freud couldn’t but reach the following conclusion: memory can be pathological.But how could the pathways of memory be adequately explored for the benefit of the patient? The second part of this article will focus on the ways in which Freud mapped out this uncharted territory which he ultimately named “the Unconscious” by analysing his patients’ struggles with memory. Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, is also the inventor of words and language: it is therefore no surprise that Freud relied first and foremost on language to uncover the complexity of memory as a locus of conflicts between the memories the patient is able to conjure up and those that are – more or less successfully – repressed. Inaugurating the “talking cure,” he thus followed his analysands’ “associations” and the paths they traced, all the while trying to make progress despite the resistance he regularly faced. One of the most enlightening records of such research is the letter he wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess on December 6, 1896. This letter testifies to his vivid efforts to explain how mnemonic traces are left, while laying out on the page the dialectics between consciousness and memory with several diagrams. But interestingly, Freud’s description of organic phenomena such as neural pathways is closely linked with the metaphor of writing and with actual letters to refer to various systems (“W,” “Wz,” “Ub” and “Vb” for example). Could memory thus be considered as a text? To what extent could the human subject be the result of such letters, such “traces,” “translation,” “transcriptions” or “inscriptions”?These questions will lead me to the last part of the article, which will discuss French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s original and subversive approach to memory. Influenced by structuralism, Lacan also owes a lot to Freud’s intuition about the structure of memory as a text and the “superstructure” [Oberbau] identified by the Viennese psychoanalyst in his letter to Fliess. As opposed to the usual acceptation of memory as a natural capacity one should increase or an ability we could actively develop (by simply looking back and remembering), Lacan situates memory at the level of the linguistic structure that determines the “speakingbeing.” “Our” memory is thus defined as a signifying structure superseding our existence. Closely articulated as it is to the laws of language, memory ultimately informs, and even authorises, our realities. If memory turns out to be pathological, it is therefore because as human subjects, we are “subjected” to language, to the impossibilities that the laws of the signifier necessarily entail. Such is our “vassalage to the law,” which Lacan examines in his Seminar on the Purloined Letter. But subverting the notion of a “natural” or a biological memory by emphasising our subjection to “symbolic” memory raises an ethical dilemma: does the tyranny of the signifier necessarily mean that we are left with no choice, no leeway, no agency? Perhaps our responsibility lies in our desire to decipher the text of our memory so as to make sense of how it affects us. |
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