Plea for the unity of the Freudian theory of memory

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Notes

1. I suspect that a French version might read: “Se remémorer. La mémoire sans souvenir” (cf. Botella and Botella, 2007, p. 41).

2. Here, pars pro toto, I mention only the two terms figurabilité/figurability as a translation for the Freudian Darstellbarkeit, as well as the regrédience/regredience explicated in the text itself as a substantivized form of the Freudian regredient.

3. This term ‘theory of representation’ would also be worthy of extensive commentary, which would have to go into detail about specific differences between languages. The English representation or indeed the French représentation can mean both ‘Repräsentation’ and ‘Vorstellung’ in German. In the Freudian text, incidentally, the German term ‘Repräsentation’ does not occur. Within the first topography Freud speaks either of representatives of the drive (Triebrepräsentanzen in the original; these are presentations=Vorstellungen and affects) or of ‘Vorstellungen’, which in turn break down into word, thing and object presentations (Vorstellungen in the original). In this respect this first topology is at once a representative model (Repräsentanzenmodell in the original) but not a theory of representation (Repräsentation in the original). [In another context I have taken Botella's French term non‐représentation to mean a “Nicht‐” or else “Ohne‐Vorstellung”, since it strikes me as preposterous to speak of an unconscious without representatives (and thus also without representation) (on this point, see at length Hock, 2013, p. 951).] The difference between Vorstellung and Repräsentation in German is considerable. Whereas Vorstellung always implies a subject which imagines something, the point of Repräsentation is a substitutional relationship: one thing stands in for something else. No subject is needed for that, but rather a sign (word, picture).

4. Accordingly, the following passage will also be found there: “Indeed, dreaming is another kind of remembering, though one that is subject to the conditions that rule at night and to the laws of dream‐formation [quoted by Botella up to here]. As I explain to myself, it is in this recurrence in dreams that the patients themselves gradually acquire a profound conviction of the reality of these primal scenes, a conviction which is in no respect inferior to one based on recollection” (Freud, 1918, p. 80). Should this not be evidence enough that Freud consistently researched into recollection without a sense of memory?

5. There it says, e.g.: “that the earliest experiences of childhood are no longer to be obtained as such, but will be replaced in the analysis by ‘transferences’ and dreams” (Freud, 1900, p. 190). The text in italic is Freud's and indicates that these snippets of speech crop up in the dream text. The dream in question is the butcher's wife's dream.