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The psychoanalytical investigation of memory: a subversion of subjectivity

Julien Alliot

Abstracts

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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Introduction

  • 1 Even if “comparative mythology points in favor of such a reading,” the scholar still highlights “se (...)

1In “Waters of Memory, Waters of Forgetfulness,” Indo-European religion scholar Bruce Lincoln discusses the etymology of the word “memory,” tracing it back to the mythological Norse god Mímir. The latter is introduced in Snorri Sturluson’s 13th-century Gylfaginning as follows: “And under that root [of the world-tree, Yggdrasill], which turns toward the frost-giants is Mímir’s Spring, in which knowledge and understanding are hidden. He who owns that spring is called Mímir, and he is full of wisdom, because he drinks from that spring” (Lincoln [1982: 26]). According to Lincoln [1982: 27], Mímir’s name can be compared with that of the Celtic goddess Rosmerta in that both might derive from the Proto-Indo-European verb *-(s)mer (to think, recall, reflect, worry over). Mímir could thus be construed as a personification of memory, his name possibly being the reduplication of the verb *-(s)mer (although Lincoln also warns against a ready acceptance of this hypothesis1).

2In such a stimulating investigation of the “source” of memory, not only does Mímir’s Spring present memory as the necessary vehicle towards wisdom, but morphologically, the god’s deverbal name suggests that we are almost twice removed from better understanding: thinking or reflecting alone might not be sufficient to re-member, that is, to access what little knowledge bubbles up from Mímir’s Spring.

3This fruitful etymology, and more broadly speaking the geographical metaphors in myths such as Gylfaginning, also point to a particularly human difficulty: feeling at home in a world that sometimes does not make much sense, with the suspicion that inaccessible mysteries lie in the underworld (under the root of the world-tree Yggdrasil for the Norse, or “hidden” at the bottom of Mímir’s well). Significantly, memory holds a particular place in such a landscape – a liminal one.

4Six centuries later, Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud – incidentally, an archaeology enthusiast – also set out to explore the lasting traces and remains of his patients’ lived experiences through anamnesis. His scientific interest was all the more piqued by the fact that remembering, rather than proceeding merely from a deliberate act of will, faces all manner of resistances. By delving into those sedimented depths and “draw[ing] on a source that is ordinarily denied to [him]” (as he put it in Psychopathology of Everyday Life [1901: 12]), he hoped that his analysands’ retrieved past memories could be accommodated with the present in a less pathogenic way.

5This article proposes to focus on this specific, psychoanalytical stage of the longstanding exploration of memory and its neighbouring territory: oblivion. How has the meaning of “memory” been radically altered by psychoanalysis? Drawing on groundbreaking texts by Sigmund Freud and his French heir Jacques Lacan, I seek to demonstrate that the semantic spaces covered by these two notions – memory and oblivion – 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 not only affected by memory but determined by it, hence our difficulty to define memory. Indeed, memory might very well be the one defining us. Since the pioneering discovery of the Unconscious, we now know, as Freud famously stated, that “the ego is not master in its own house” [1917: 275].

6My starting point will be an account of Freud’s encounter with what he would call neurosis, and more particularly the neurotic symptom insofar as more often than not, memory plays a prominent role in it. By deciding to carefully listen to what patients had to say, Freud uncovered a variety of ways in which memory could potentially be pathological. His examination of memory proves of particular interest, not only from a clinical standpoint but also in a lexicological perspective, since it led him to differentiate between memory [Gedächtnis], recollection [Erinnerung], reminiscence [Reminiszenz] or repetition [Wiederholung].

7But 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. 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. In Freud’s letter, memory almost becomes a textual trace, a literal transcription of inscription begging to be deciphered. Could memory then be considered a text?

8This question will lead me to my last part, in which I 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” identified by the Viennese psychoanalyst in his letter to Fliess. 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.” Closely articulated as it is to the laws of language, memory ultimately informs, and even authorises, our realities. The Lacanian approach to memory, by emphasising our “vassalage to the law,” completely subverts the notion of a “natural memory” by emphasising a symbolic memory: the signifying structure superseding our existence.

1. Pathogenic memories

9Freud’s investigation of memory started at the sickbed and built upon the study of clinical cases (fittingly, kline is in fact the Greek word for “bed”). A neuroanatomist at first, he quickly turned to clinical neurology and decided to travel to Paris in 1885 to meet the illustrious neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot who, every Tuesday at the Salpêtrière Hospital, presented and hypnotised his – mostly female – hysteric patients to a fascinated audience of – mostly male – medical students. Charcot’s spectacular presentations, in which he would demonstrate the various stages of hysteria, indeed gave their audience a lot to see and made him famous throughout Europe.

10When Freud came back from Paris, he wrote several contributions for Villaret’s Handwörterbuch der gesamten Medizin, a medical dictionary. Although the articles were not signed, the one on hysteria – likely authored by Freud – testifies to the changing perception of the disease at the dawn of the 20th century. From “bête noire of medicine” (Freud [1888: 41]) hysteria turned into a stimulating object of scientific interest, especially since Charcot set out to study it. Although the article’s author describes the symptomatology of hysteria and its various phases at length, the limitations of clinical observations are also regularly hinted at, as in the following definition: “Hysteria is a neurosis in the strictest sense of the word – that is to say, not only have no perceptible changes in the nervous system been found in this illness, but it is not to be expected that any refinement of anatomical techniques would reveal any such changes” (Freud [1888: 41]). In other words, the etiology of hysteria remained a mystery, as if the disease’s myriad of symptoms – convulsive attacks, disturbances of sensory activity, paralyses, to name but a few – gratified clinical observation while at the same time obscuring their root causes.

11But at the end of this article on hysteria, we find the first suggestion that the main pathogen could very well lie in the patient’s memory. As the author discusses the efficiency of hypnosis in the treatment of hysteria, a new method is advocated: looking “for the causes of hysteria in unconscious ideational life” and “lead[ing] the patient under hypnosis back to the psychical prehistory of the ailment” (Freud [1888: 56]). From then on, the investigation of hysteria will increasingly involve an examination on the nature of memory.

12In his 1893 Studies on Hysteria, Freud followed his intuition that delving into the patient’s history might turn out to be rewarding. However, his encounter with hysteric patients led him to refine his approach of memory. In fact, to investigate the psychical mechanisms of hysterical phenomena, he would first systematically resort to suggestion and hypnosis. But he quickly noticed that merely mentioning past events or traumas under hypnosis would not be sufficient for patients to be cured. The trauma, he explained, did not merely “[act] like an agent provocateur in releasing the symptom, which thereafter leads an independent existence” [1893: 6]. A purely medical epistemological framework therefore fails to account for the hysterical symptom, since identifying its cause is not sufficient to find the appropriate cure. Freud is then led to the conclusion that “[r]ecollection without affect almost invariably produces no result” [1893: 6], making a decisive distinction between memory and one of its avatars: recollection.

13In his “preliminary communication,” Freud brings in another noun – reminiscence, which should be distinguished from memory and recollection – in his famous statement, “[h]ysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences” [1893: 7]. For him, the “determining process continues to operate […] for years – not through a chain of intermediate causal links, but as a directly releasing cause – just as a psychical pain that is remembered in waking consciousness still provokes a lachrymal secretion long after the event” [1893: 7]. If, on the one hand, recollections can be recalled to mind without affecting us, reminiscences of past experiences, on the other hand, continue to affect a given subject “directly,” as if unmediated by words. In fact, Freud would take up this idea of a separation between idea and affect as the very definition of the process of repression, whereby “the repressed idea would persist as a memory trace that is weak,” “while the affect that is torn from it would be used for a somatic innervation” [1893: 285].

  • 2 As excessive as the word “traumatic” might seem, especially given its subsequent history, Freud doe (...)

14That is why Freud reasserts the importance of “put[ting] the affect into words” and posits the following axiom: “each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible details” [1893: 6]. A traumatic memory2, if given the appropriate verbal utterance, might therefore pave the way for a disappearance of the symptom. Because it stems from a particular, pathogenic memory, hysteria thus invites whoever is interested in it to delve into the complexity of memory at large.

15In that respect, Freud’s eye-opening encounter with Frau Emmy von N. allowed him to refine his technique by taking into account her desire to articulate her experience into words. After being hypnotized for several days in a row, the patient opposed some resistance to Freud and suddenly said “in a definitely grumbling tone that [he] was not to keep on asking her where this and that came from, but to let her tell [him] what she had to say” (Freud [1893: 62]). The young neurologist then realized that clinical observation was perhaps not enough to treat hysteria and that those patients were craving to be heard. He therefore changed his attitude, let them speak freely and enlighten him in the process, especially on the associative mechanisms at play in the process of memory, which Freud named “the laws of association” [1893: 16].

16Freud’s initial interest for the hysterical symptoms therefore proved unexpectedly fruitful, leading him to observe the effect of memory upon us, to distinguish between recollection and reminiscence and to examine the varieties of ways in which our past makes us who we are. If our individual history does shape our destiny, the associative logic that determines our memory and its functioning fascinated the inventor of psychoanalysis more and more. It is therefore no wonder that he should have investigated the counterpart of memory: forgetfulness.

17In his 1898 article “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness” and later in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, he deliberately turned his attention to seemingly insignificant phenomena, such as forgetting proper nouns, and raised new questions: why is it that we forget things? Could this inhibition of our psychical faculty to remember be more than pure accident? What are the processes or the forces that make us forget? For example, analysing the reasons why he found himself unable to recall the name “Signorelli” as he was chatting with a stranger he had met on his way to Herzegovina, Freud is struck by the fact that two names came to his mind instead: Botticelli and Boltraffio. The latter names, he goes on to explain, “can be inserted into an associative series” [1901: 3] with the conversation topic that immediately preceded: the “customs of the Turks living in Bosnia and Herzegovina” [1901: 3]. Pushing the exploration further, he recounts how he decided not to tell this stranger an anecdote that could have been unseemly in the context of this chance encounter: “These Turks place a higher value on sexual enjoyment than on anything else, and in the event of sexual disorders, they are plunged in a despair which contrasts strangely with their resignation towards the threat of death” [1901: 3]. This association between death and sexuality also conjures up the memory of one of his colleague’s patients who said to his analyst: “Herr, you must know that if that comes to an end then life is of no value” [1901: 3]. The last link in the chain that Freud pieces back together is the name of a place, Trafoi, where he learnt that one of his former patients had committed suicide “on account of an incurable sexual disorder” [1901: 3].

18Freud finds himself amazed by the way in which “the missing name and the repressed topic […] became linked” [1901: 3]. After undergoing a division in two parts, the syllable “-elli” was preserved in the substitute name Botticelli. Then, prompted by the repression of Freud’s thoughts of death and sexuality, the other half, “Signor-”, was translated into its German equivalent Herr, which was then connected to the names of “Herzegovina and Bosnia.” The first syllable of Bosnia recurs in Botticelli, but also in “Boltraffio” – the name of the latter Italian painter also echoing that of the village of Trafoi. Therefore, following those associations, Freud is able to retrace a complex chain leading all the way to the forgotten name “Signorelli.”

19In the end, he comes to a radical conclusion, which might at first read like a paradox: “I wanted, therefore, to forget something” (as if forgetting could stem from an act of will), before rephrasing, “I had repressed something” [1901: 4]. The result of this operation is “a sort of compromise” which made him remember “just as much of what [he] wanted to forget as of what [he] wanted to remember” [1901: 4].

20Memory, therefore, is not merely a psychical faculty that eludes us at times for arbitrary reasons. On the contrary, it now appears like the locus of a conflict whose mechanisms are brought to light by the fact that sometimes, the intention to forget is both successful (we don’t remember a given name) and incomplete (we remember other names that bear some relations with what we wanted to forget). Memory thus becomes a territory to be explored by following the pathways traced by the various – mostly linguistic – associations at play in the process of forgetting. In the case of Signorelli, Freud draws in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life what he calls a “picture-puzzle (or rebus)” [1901: 5] representing how the syllables of the words Bosnia or Trafoi were substituted to those of Signorelli to result in the names of Botticelli and Boltraffio that came to his mind. 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.

21Following Freud’s journey, we first found that “recollections” of events can occur to us without affecting us, hence the impasse of hypnosis as a therapeutic tool. On the other hand, “reminiscences” continue to affect us directly, as is the case in hysteria. But analysing seemingly trifle phenomena like the forgetting of proper nouns allowed Freud to try and reconcile memory and affects by postulating a process of repression which abides by associative and linguistic laws. Thanks to the analysis of compromise formations like the words that are substituted to the (imperfectly) forgotten proper noun, he was able to reject the notion of an “arbitrary psychical choice” and to posit instead the existence of “paths which can be predicted and which conform to laws” [1901: 2].

22Before following him on such pathways, it might be worth evoking one last manifestation of how pathogenic memory could become: the repetition compulsion. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, written in the aftermath of the First World war, Freud set out to examine a condition called “traumatic neurosis,” which occur after life-threatening accidents or wars. He points out that dreams in such neuroses “have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation in which he wakes up in another fright” [1920: 13]. The repetition of such unpleasant memories in dreams leads Freud to wonder what undermines the usually “wish-fulfilling tenor of dreams” [1920: 13] and to isolate what he calls “a compulsion to repeat” [1920: 35]. Such a compulsion takes root in our infancy, since Freud notes that children usually derive pleasure from the sheer repetition of the same experience. If the experience is unpleasurable, then the repetition becomes all the more important since each recurrence provides an opportunity to “master a powerful impression” [1920: 35]. Therefore, repeating is much different from remembering and can sometimes “give the appearance of some ‘daemonic’ force at work” [1920: 36]. Because it consistently points to what cannot be integrated, repetition could be construed as the epitome of what cannot be remembered, leading us to repeat until we remember.

23By seriously investigating what affects human beings, psychoanalysis was led to examine the complex nature of memory. Following the associative processes at work in various forms of psychopathology, it was able to distinguish between recollection, reminiscence or repetition of an inassimilable trauma. As he ventured on previously uncharted territories, how did Freud map out what he called “the Unconscious” by analysing his patients’ struggles? And more importantly, how did his work contribute to outline what memory is made of?

2. The materiality of memory: a neurobiological approach

24As we have seen, Freud’s clinical experience confronted him with the multiple psychopathological manifestations of the ways in which humans are affected by memory. A scientist, he then set out to formulate hypotheses to account for his first phenomenological approach to memory and even tried to map out the psychic apparatus. His attempt is worth delving into to better appreciate how Freud’s work revealed what determines the human subject.

25In 1895, Freud explicitly tried to apply the scientific method to his investigation of memory in his text Project for a Scientific Psychology, where he explained how psychic processes could be located in the interplay of neurons themselves. The text opens, “The intention is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles,” adding that the “neurons are to be taken as the material particles” [1895: 294]. His neurological approach is therefore a positivist and above all a materialist one, since the neuronal system is construed as the potential locus of the psychic apparatus.

26Being affected by memory may therefore pertain to the structure and functions of our neurones. Starting from the observation that the “main characteristic of nervous tissue is memory,” in other words “a capacity for being permanently altered by single occurrences” [1895: 299], Freud strives to describe how excitations by given quantities of energy transform our neurones. In his introduction, he puts forward the hypothesis of more or less conductive “contact-barriers” situated between one neurone and another. He goes on to distinguish between a system of neurones that allow for quantities of excitation to pass them without being altered – which he calls φ –, and on the other hand the impermeable neurones “whose contact barriers make themselves felt, so that they only allow [quantities of excitations] to pass through with difficulty or partially” [1895: 299]. Those neurones that are “loaded with resistance” [1895: 300] he calls ψ. Such a system of impermeable ψ neurones, he explains, “afford[s] a possibility of representing memory” [1895: 299]. In fact, the contact-barrier of ψ neurones can be permanently altered by the passage of an excitation. In addition, the process of recollection or the intensity of a given impression can both contribute to this alteration by making the contact-barriers more capable of conduction, bringing those ψ neurones closer to φ neurones. Freud describes this “state of the contact-barriers as their degree of facilitation [Bahnung],” before establishing that “[m]emory is represented by the facilitations existing between the ψ neurones” [1895: 300]. Ultimately, this definition testifies to Freud’s scientific interest in providing a visual and therefore perspicuous idea of the nature of memory, while situating its materiality in our nervous system.

  • 3 It is worth noting that what first seemed metaphorical in Freud’s work turned out to have a biologi (...)

27Still drawing on this implicit metaphor of the neuronal pathways3, with their alternation of “barriers” and “facilitations,” Freud continued the exploration of mnemonic traces in a letter he wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess a year later, on December 6, 1896. In the beginning of his letter, he draws a schematic picture representing what he calls the “process of stratification” of memory [1896: 233]. Drawing upon this geological metaphor, he explains to Flies his new theory that “memory is present not once but several times over, that it is laid down in various species of indications” [1896: 233]. So, following those memory traces and their “re-arrangement,” he outlines a possible path from “perception” to consciousness with various moments of registration. In other words, he considers the question of what is registered or not in this path from “perception” to consciousness, identifying at least three steps in this process.

Figure 1. Freud’s “schematic picture” representing the different levels of “registrations” from perception to consciousness [1896: 234]

Figure 1. Freud’s “schematic picture” representing the different levels of “registrations” from perception to consciousness [1896: 234]

28The origins of perception take place in “W” (for Wahrnehmungen or perceptions), which corresponds to “neurones in which perceptions originate, to which consciousness attaches, but which in themselves retain no trace of what has happened” [Freud 1896: 234]. At this stage, there are perceptions but no particular registration since, for Freud, “consciousness and memory are mutually exclusive”. One should note here Freud’s hesitations about the position of consciousness in regard to perception. A year earlier, in his Project for a Scientific Psychology, he explained how the incoming stimuli in the φ neurones, which indeed “serve for perception” [1895: 300] remain, however, “without quality” [1895: 308]. That is why he posited the existence of so-called “ω neurones”, which initiate an active grasp of the incoming stimuli, thereby giving “rise to the various qualities” and “conscious sensations” [1895: 309].

29Such an active grasp occurs in “Wz” (for Wahrnehmungenzeichen or indications of perception). Such an indication of perception is “quite incapable of consciousness, and arranged according to associations by simultaneity” (Freud [1896: 234]). The baby that is rocked by his mother for instance will perceive his body moving and his mother’s soothing voice, and these perceptions will be associated synchronically. This very first arrangement by the perceiving subject (in our example a baby), this primary system of relations will be one of the first strata of the mnemonic traces to be potentially registered.

30The second registration of perceptions that Freud isolates is “Ub” (for Unbewusstsein or unconsciousness), in which what is actively grasped is now made unconscious. The arrangement now occurs “according to other (perhaps causal) relations.” Freud adds that “Ub traces would perhaps correspond to conceptual memories; equally inaccessible to consciousness” [1896: 234]. At this stage, the unconscious manifests itself in the advent of repression: a memory still remains inaccessible to consciousness but can leave traces that testify to a registration. A diachronic dimension appears, as in the hysteric symptom for example, whose causes are to be explored through anamnesis.

31The “third transcription” that Freud underlines is “Vb” (for Vorbewusstsein or preconsciousness). He explains that this transcription is “attached to word-presentations and [corresponds] to our official ego.” The thought-consciousness is “probably linked to the hallucinatory activation of word-presentations” (Freud [1896: 235]). Mnemonic traces can thus become conscious provided that they attach themselves to word-presentations, which could be understood as structured complexes which involve different aspects, including a motor articulation component. Only then do they become connected to object associations, allowing for a form of human consciousness. Such a process could explain why dreams can be interpreted and read like rebuses: in rebus-structured dreams, the word-presentations gain their autonomy again and can reverse meanings.

32So, as we have seen in Project for a Scientific Psychology and his 1896 letter to Fliess, Freud’s exploration of the pathways of memory led him to favour a materialist approach. A neurologist, he applied his scientific rigour to uncover the neurobiological bases of memory and locate its processes within the properties of the human nervous system. But in so doing, another logic seems to interfere with the medical and biological paradigms, which even informed Freud’s method: a linguistic logic, the logic of the letter itself. In fact, Freud’s description of organic phenomena such as neuronal pathways is closely linked with the metaphor of writing, as for instance when in the beginning of his letter to Fliess, he refers to “the material present” of memory-traces being subjected to “a re-transcription” [1896: 233], or when he resorts to actual letters (“W,” “Wz,” “Ub” and “Vb”) to name various moments of registrations. Admittedly, from a strictly biological point of view, memory is not structured as a text, even if neuronal adaptations and changes reveal the inscription of events in the biology. But once this is read on a more psychological level, how is the materiality of memory to be understood? Should it be located outside of the human body? Could memory thus be considered as a text? To what extent could the human subject be the result of such letters, such traces, translations, transcriptions or inscriptions?

3. Our subjection to symbolic memory: the Lacanian subversion of subjectivity

33A 20th-century French psychiatrist, Jacques Lacan felt that Freud’s followers had become overly dogmatic and had turned psychoanalysis into an all-too-respectable theory while playing down its most subversive discoveries. Influenced as he was by structuralism and Saussurean linguistics, he called his fellow analysts for a more scrupulous return to Freud, which he undertook by delving deep into Freud’s works with a fresh eye. Such phrases as the ones previously mentioned – “the laws of association,” “re-transcription,” or “put[ting] the affect into words” – are now given full meaning and their implications are elicited through close reading of the Freudian corpus to the letter.

34If indeed part of the process of memory eludes our experience, it still affects us in ways we cannot always grasp except by positing a logical necessity whose “laws” – to take up Freud’s term – we abide by unknowingly. That is precisely what Lacan explores when he affirms the “essential link between memory and law” [1956: 36] in the Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” that opens his Ecrits. This pioneering text proves crucial to understand how radically the meaning of “memory” has been altered by Lacanian psychoanalysis.

35Lacan opens his essay by acknowledging his indebtedness to Freud’s inference of a “repetition automatism” (Wiederholungszwang), which he cites as his own starting point. But “if we are to take Freud’s discovery seriously” [1956: 11], he claims, the subversion immediately begins. Lacan considers the full implications of his predecessor’s famous statement that “the ego is not master in its own house” (Freud [1917: 275]) by distinguishing between two places. On the one hand, the “signifying chain” is associated with an “insistence,” while on the other hand the “subject of the unconscious” is characterised by its “ex-istence (that is, [an] eccentric place)” [1956: 11]. Toying with the Latin etymology of these two words, Lacan subverts our expectations about what lies in the centre and what is in the periphery when he decentres the subject, locating him outside of (ex-) an order that abides by different rules. This space, a potentially unwelcoming one for the subject that “ex-ists” outside of it, is designated as the order of the “symbolic [that] takes hold in even the deepest recesses of the human organism” [1956: 12]. In this way, Lacan turns subjectivity inside out.

  • 4 Lacan uses the French term “parlêtre” [1960: 88], defining human beings as essentially speaking bei (...)

36Then, in his groundbreaking article, Lacan offers his own commentary of Edgar Allan Poe’s tale The Purloined Letter to try and illustrate the fact that “it is the symbolic order which is constitutive for the subject.” For us humans, or “speaking animal[s]” as Lacan put it in a later text4, being introduced to the signifying chain that precedes us – by being named, for instance – allows us to (or condemns us to) resort to signifiers to find our bearings in a world that is organised according to the structural logic of the signifier. It is such a logic that determines the conditions in which we are able – or not – to remember.

37In fact, Lacan’s subversive approach of the “eccentric” place of the subject is reflected in the very unusual structure he chose for his 1956 article. The first part presents his reading of the short story, in which he carefully analyses the subjective permutations of the various characters around the eponymous letter in Poe’s story, so as to outline the “major determination the subject receives from the itinerary of a signifier” [1956: 12]. This is followed by a “Presentation of the Suite” [1956: 30], and then by an “Introduction” [1956: 33] and a “Parenthesis of Parentheses (added in 1966)” [1956: 41]. Just like it questions the notions of centre and periphery, the text radically destabilises the usual chronological – and even logical – landmarks, by placing the introduction in the middle or opening multiple layers of parentheses within the text. In that respect, its structure is homogeneous with its content, since it undermines the linearity of time, testifying to the possibility of another order in which time is out of joint.

38Ultimately, if subjectivity is completely determined by the symbolic order whose logic tends to elude us, how could memory and the necessities of a cold, lifeless law be articulated? How to make the world liveable in this context? One possible answer is to try and assess the coordinates of our experience which inform and even authorise our realities. That is precisely what Lacan tries to do in the last two parts of his text. For the purpose of this article, I will only focus on the beginning of his formal construct eliciting the strict logical necessity that presides over our subjectivities.

39The “Introduction” opens on a reminder of Freud’s “repetition automatism” and his innovative “conception of memory implied by his ‘unconscious’” (Lacan [1956: 34]). In fact, Freud utterly revamped our notions of what it means to remember by “ravishing the necessity included in this repetition from the human agent identified with consciousness” (Lacan [1956: 34]). In other words, our agency is limited by such an unsurpassable necessity, which he calls “symbolic repetition,” before adding: “it turns out that the symbol’s order can no longer be conceived of there as constituted by man but must rather be conceived of as constituting him.” Contrasting -EN and -ING forms, Lacan underlines how much the subject is no longer the agent but is being acted upon by determinations that are then mathematically formalised.

40First, Lacan proposes to devise a random series of plus and minus signs that he notes (+) and (-) to connote presence and absence. This basic alternative derives from Freud’s observation of his grand-son playing with a cotton reel in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The child, he noted, alternatively threw the reel out of his cot, away from him, uttering “o-o-o-o,” and then pulled it by the string to retrieve it, exclaiming “da” [1920: 15]. The child’s experience of such an alternation between presence or absence is identified by Lacan with “the determination that the human animal receives from the symbolic order” [1956: 35], in which signifiers conjure up something that can be absent. With a series of (+) and (-) “playing on the sole fundamental alternative of presence and absence,” Lacan sets out to “demonstrate how the strictest symbolic determinations accommodate a succession of [coin] tosses whose reality is strictly distributed ‘by chance’” [1956: 35].

41The second step of his illustration consists in grouping (+) and (-) in threes and defining three cases, classified as 1, 2 and 3:

  • 1 being the groups of three that are symmetrical and constant, such as (+ + +) or (- - -);

  • 3 being the groups of three that are symmetrical but characterised by an alternation, such as (+ - +) or (- + -) ;

  • 2 being groups of three that are asymmetrical, such as (+ + -) or (- + +).

42The introduction of such conventions, Lacan explains, allows for “possibilities and impossibilities of succession to appear” [1956: 35] in the previously random series of (+) and (-). To take but one example, let us take a series of 2s that begin with a 1: (+ + + - - + + - -). This series can be “translated” as follows: 1 2 2 2 2 2 2. To interrupt this succession of 2s with a 1 or a 3, it appears that there are only two possibilities:

43If the amount of 2s is even, then we can only have a 1. In the example above, adding a (+) at the end of the six 2s results in another 2, whereas adding a (-) will add a 1. It is impossible to add a 3.

44If the amount of 2s is odd, then we can only have a 3. If we add another 2 to the series presented above, we will have seven 2s: (+ + + - - + + - - +) is now noted 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2. If we add a (+) at the end of the series, then we will obtain another 2. However, if we add a (-), then we will obtain a 3. Under no circumstances can we have a 1 in this case.

45Interestingly, these mathematical manipulations point to a new acceptation of memory. Lacan explains that “as long as a uniform succession of 2s, which began after a 1, lasts, the series will remember the even or odd ranks of each of these 2s, since this rank is responsible for the fact that this sequence can only be broken by a 1 after an even number of 2s or by a 3 after an odd number of 2s” [1956: 36]. A structure emerges in the randomness of coin tosses once a symbolic convention is applied to it. This is how Lacan distinguishes between the dimension of the real and the symbolic, the latter being superimposed on the real as the only way to account for it, to find a stable place in the randomness and unpredictability that characterise the real. That is why, for Lacan, “subjectivity has no relation to the real, but rather a syntax which is engendered by the signifying mark there” [1956: 38].

46With this decisive return to Freud, Lacan allows us to refine our definition of memory by distinguishing between memory and what he calls “the remembering” (“mémoration”): “the remembering at stake in the unconscious […] is not related to the register that is assumed to be that of memory, insofar as memory is taken to be a property of a living being” [1956: 31]. Going beyond the notion of memory as a human ability to conjure up the past to consciousness, Lacan introduces another type of memory which interferes in the process: “mémoration” defined as “something prevital and transbiological” [1956: 39]. While its conditions are determined by the speakingbeing’s “vassalage to the Law” [1956: 22] of language, memory is a property of the living, characteristic of the way human subjects situate themselves and find a liveable place for themselves in this signifying structure that supersedes their existence.

47The stakes of a psychoanalytical examination of memory are high. By describing the processes that allow for memories to resurface or that make them sink into oblivion, Sigmund Freud uncovered a whole new territory which he called the “Unconscious.” He then explored this uncanny territory, both a familiar and an unfamiliar one, following the pathways opened by his analysands’ words. A neurologist, he even tried to trace those routes and locate them in the human neuronal system, an attempt that he later gave up on.

48Jacques Lacan continued this exploration and articulated the biological and the inorganic logic that presides over it in a different way. The subject is now construed as the product of the signifying chain, whose logic is cold, almost mathematical, resulting in a “remembering” that determines the unconscious. Still, the human subject, with its history, its various drives and its desire, can potentially be articulated to this logic and bring life back into this “prevital” order, as the phenomenon of memory reveals insofar as it is the vital counterpart of “remembering.”

49Defining memory therefore raises a profoundly ethical question: does the tyranny of the signifier necessarily mean that we are left with no choice or no agency? Perhaps our responsibility – the way we respond to the overdetermination of our subjectivities – 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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Bibliography

Bliss, Timothy & Terje Lomo. 1973. The Journal of Physiology 232(2). 331-356. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1350458/ 6 April, 2025)

Foster, Michael (ed.). 1897 [1887]. A Text-book of Physiology (7th edition). Book Three: The central nervous system and its instruments. London, New York: Macmillan and co. 929-930.

Freud, Sigmund. 1966 [1888]. Hysteria. In James Strachey et al. (transl.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1, 39-61. London: Hogarth Press.

Freud, Sigmund & Josef Breuer. 1955 [1893]. In James Strachey et al. (transl.) Studies on hysteria. The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2. London: Hogarth Press.

Freud, Sigmund. 1966 [1895]. Project for a scientific psychology. In James Strachey et al. (transl.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1, 281-396. London: Hogarth Press.

Freud, Sigmund. 1966 [1896]. “Letter 52.” Extracts from the Fliess papers. In James Strachey et al. (transl.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1, 233-239. London: Hogarth Press.

Freud, Sigmund. 1960 [1901]. The psychopathology of everyday life. In James Strachey et al. (transl.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 6. London: Hogarth Press.

Freud Sigmund. 1995 [1917]. A difficulty in the path of psychoanalysis. Joan Riviere (transl.). In Sander L. Gilman (ed.), Psychological writings and letters, 269-276. New York: Continuum.

Freud, Sigmund. 1955 [1920]. Beyond the pleasure principle. In James Strachey et al. (transl.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, 1-64. London: Hogarth Press.

Lacan, Jacques. 2006 [1956]. Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”. In Bruce Fink, Héloise Fink & Russell Grigg (transl.) Écrits, 6-50. New York: Norton.

Lacan, Jacques. 2005 [1960]. Le Triomphe de la religion (précédé de Discours aux catholiques). Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Lincoln, Bruce. 1982. “Waters of Memory, Waters of Forgetfulness.” Fabula 23. 19-34. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249927289_Waters_of_Memory_Waters_of_Forgetfulness (12 November, 2024.)

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Notes

1 Even if “comparative mythology points in favor of such a reading,” the scholar still highlights “several phonological problems that must give us pause.” (Lincoln [1982: 27])

2 As excessive as the word “traumatic” might seem, especially given its subsequent history, Freud does compare the hysterics’ early, “distressing affects – such as those of fright, anxiety, shame or physical pain” to “psychical traumas.” In some cases, he adds, “an apparently trivial circumstance combines with the actually operative event or occurs at a time of peculiar susceptibility to stimulation and in this way attains the dignity of a trauma” [1893: 6].

3 It is worth noting that what first seemed metaphorical in Freud’s work turned out to have a biological and material reality. Freud’s “barriers,” for instance, are the actual “synaps[e]s” mentioned by British physiologist Sir Michael Foster and his student Sir Charles Scott Sherrington in Foster, Michael (ed.). 1887. A Text-book of Physiology (7th edition). Book Three: The central nervous system and its instruments. London, New York: Macmillan and co., 1897. 929-930. As for the “facilitations,” they were studied later and called Long-Term Potentiation (LTP), especially in the wake of neuroscientists Timothy Bliss and Terje Lomo’s groundbreaking article “Long-lasting potentiation of synaptic transmission in the dentate area of the anaesthetized rabbit following stimulation of the perforant path” (Bliss, Timothy & Terje Lomo. 1973. The Journal of Physiology, 232(2). 331-356. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1350458/ 6 April, 2025).

4 Lacan uses the French term “parlêtre” [1960: 88], defining human beings as essentially speaking beings (« le fait que l’homme est un animal parlant »). Translation mine.

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List of illustrations

Title Figure 1. Freud’s “schematic picture” representing the different levels of “registrations” from perception to consciousness [1896: 234]
URL http://journals.openedition.org/lexis/docannexe/image/9546/img-1.png
File image/png, 154k
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References

Electronic reference

Julien Alliot, The psychoanalytical investigation of memory: a subversion of subjectivityLexis [Online], Words about #1 | 2025, Online since 12 May 2025, connection on 09 July 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lexis/9546; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/13wnf

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About the author

Julien Alliot

Sorbonne Université, Association Lacanienne Internationale, France
julienalliot@yahoo.fr

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Copyright

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-SA 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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