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Abstract
The author begins by attempting to evaluate the notions of memory and remembering, taking into account their evolution in Freud's work and the current debates on their relative importance in conducting an analytic treatment. This leads the author to develop an extension of the theory which none the less remains Freudian, by introducing a series of notions (the main ones being the work of figurability, regredience, state of session, negative of trauma, and memory without recollection), and arguing in favour of a principle of convergence‐coherence governing mental life. His thesis is the following: analytic practice contains a dimension of an archaeological order, as Freud described it, as well as − thanks to the contribution of contemporary practice denouncing its insufficiency − the complementary need for the analyst to work in a particular way in the session – that is to say, one that involves what he calls a regredience of his or her thought processes, allowing him or her to gain access to early psychic zones beyond the zone of represented memories. This is what he calls transformational psychoanalysis, complementary to archeological psychoanalysis. The author's theoretical and practical developments are backed up by a personal schema of mental functioning, an extension of Freud's schema in 1900, and the detailed description of an analytic treatment, in particular, the central session which played a crucial role in the success of this analysis.
1. This text is a modified version of a lecture given at the British Psychoanalytic Society on 28 October 2011. It contains additional material from a clinical seminar which took place the day before. I would like to thank Michael Parsons, James Rose, Josh Cohen and Christine Miqueu‐Baz for their invaluable participation.
2. Translated by Andrew Weller.
1. This text is a modified version of a lecture given at the British Psychoanalytic Society on 28 October 2011. It contains additional material from a clinical seminar which took place the day before. I would like to thank Michael Parsons, James Rose, Josh Cohen and Christine Miqueu‐Baz for their invaluable participation.
2. Translated by Andrew Weller.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the reviewers for their judicious remarks, as a result of which I have made a number of changes to this article. In line with their advice, I have clarified certain points and removed a number of heavy passages. I have also succeeded in considerably shortening my text. This required modifications in the argument and finally the title of the article has also been modified.
Notes
1. This text is a modified version of a lecture given at the British Psychoanalytic Society on 28 October 2011. It contains additional material from a clinical seminar which took place the day before. I would like to thank Michael Parsons, James Rose, Josh Cohen and Christine Miqueu‐Baz for their invaluable participation.
2. Translated by Andrew Weller.
3. Colloquium in Deauville, 1973. Revue Française de Psychanalyse 3, 1974.
4. Freud writes: “Quite often we do not succeed in bringing the patient to recollect what has been repressed. Instead of that, if the analysis is carried out correctly, we produce in him an assured conviction of the truth of the construction which achieves the same therapeutic result as a recaptured memory [my emphasis]” (1937d, pp. 265–6).
5. Freud writes: “In these processes it particularly often happens that something is ‘remembered’ which could never have been ‘forgotten’ because it was never at any time noticed – was never conscious. & The conviction which the patient obtains in the course of his analysis is quite independent of this kind of memory” (1914g, p. 149).
6. Botella and Botella (Citation2001).
7. It is worth noting that the term Traumgedächtnis was only used by Freud at the beginning, in 1895, in the Project (Freud, Citation1950a[1895]), in 1900 in The Interpretation of Dreams, then in his last text in 1938, always in the same sense and almost in the same terms. Once again this confirms our idea that Freud abandoned the metapsychology of 1900 throughout his work, before taking it up again at the end. We have explained the reasons for this elsewhere.
8. Freud (Citation1900a, pp. 15–16):“&very remote and even forgotten events from our earliest years” (Hildebrandt); or again “&the depths of memory in dreams also include & events dating from the earliest times & and which consequently seem completely alien and unknown&” (Strumpell).
9. Freud (Citation1896b, p. 181, Further remarks on the neuro‐psychoses of defence): “I had found, therefore, that these hallucinations were nothing else than parts of the content of repressed childhood experiences&”.
10. CitationFreud (1918b, p. 51, From the history of an infantile neurosis): “Indeed, dreaming is another kind of remembering, though one that is subject to the conditions that the rule at night and so the laws of dream‐formation&”.
11. Freud (Citation1914g, p. 149, Remembering, repeating and working‐through): “These are experiences which occurred in very early childhood and were not understood at the time but which were subsequently understood and interpreted. One gains a knowledge of them through dreams&”.
12. Freud (Citation1937d, p. 267): “Perhaps it may be a general characteristic of hallucinations to which sufficient attention has not hitherto been paid that in them something that has been experienced in infancy and then forgotten returns – something that the child has seen or heard at a time when he could still hardly speak&”.
13. “& the momentary and transient extravagances (a formulation Freud would use word for word applying it to dreams) which are to be found in all truly creative minds & Where there is a creative mind, Reason & relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell‐mell, and only then does it look them through and examine them in mass (Schiller, cited by Freud, Citation1900a, p. 103).
14. “If a new result is to have any value, it must unite elements long since known, but till then scattered and seemingly foreign to each other, and suddenly introduce order where the appearance of disorder reigned& Not only is the new fact valuable on its own account, but it gives value to the new facts it unites. Our mind is frail as our senses are; it would lose itself in the complexity of the world if that complexity were not harmonious; like the short‐sighted, it would only see the details& The only facts worthy of our attention are those which introduce order into this complexity and so make it accessible to us” (Poincaré, Citation1908, p. 30).
15. I have in mind here the important contributions by Michael Parsons (Citation2000), and his contribution to the 2007 IPA Congress Panel ‘Remembering and dream‐memory’; and also by James Rose (Citation2011).
16. I would like to thank Cláudio Laks Eizirik for having sent me the text of his communication.
17. This session is part of the Report given with S. Botella to the CPLF in 2001. Translator's note: I have left the word ‘trousse’ in French, as it is important for understanding what follows; its generic meaning is ‘case’ or ‘bag’, but it is also a component of a variety of expressions in French.
18. “All the essentials are preserved; even things that seem completely forgotten are present somehow and somewhere, and have merely been buried [verschüttet] and made inaccessible to the subject. Indeed, it may, as we know, be doubted whether any psychical structure can really be the victim of total destruction. It depends only upon analytical technique whether we shall succeed in bringing what is concealed completely to light. There are only two other facts that weigh against the extraordinary advantage which is thus enjoyed by the work of analysis: namely, that psychical objects are incomparably more complicated than the excavator's material ones and that we have insufficient knowledge of what we may expect to find, since their finer structure contains so much that is still mysterious” (Freud, Citation1937d, p. 260, my emphasis).
The term ‘verschüttet’, rarely employed by Freud, appears only in Delusions and dreams in Jensen's Gradiva (Freud, Citation1907a) and 30 years later in Analysis terminable and interminable (Freud, Citation1937c) to refer to that which is not of the order of repression or denial, but “another part (of the material) & will become buried, as it were, and lost to our therapeutic efforts” (Freud, Citation1937d, p. 218).
19. Freud says, citing Ferenczi, as a catalytic ferment (Freud, Citation1910a[1909], p. 51). This was at Clark University in 1909. Likewise, in his intervention at the IPA Congress in Budapest in 1918 (Freud, Citation1919a[1918], p. 161).
20. Later, notably in the New Introductory Lectures of 1932, Freud came to regard this tendency as a characteristic of the ego, using the term synthesis, which minimizes the urgent need for intelligibility in the service of the rationality of the ego in its attempts to adapt to the environment. Lacan was to deride the idea of synthesis. Freud himself seemed embarrassed by it and hoped that he would succeed in tracing the idea of ego‐synthesis back to its instinctual, but in fact he never did so (Freud, Citation1933a[1932]), p. 76).