Memory in Freud

TitleMemory in Freud
Publication TypeBook Chapter
Year of PublicationSubmitted
AuthorsRichard Terdiman, Susannah Radstone, Bill Schwarz,
Pagination93-108
PublisherFordham University Press
CityNew York
Notes

'\n{100} For psychoanalysis, the unconscious is memory\'s fundamental repository. The memories to which psychoanalysis attends, the memories that define its theoretical originality, are those that reside in this archive but have been subjected to repression. Hence we have no direct access to them.\n'
'\n{94} Freud\'s preoccupation with memory proliferated and pervaded his psychological theory, to the point where theindividual almost seemed to have been reconceived as a cluster of mermory operations and transformations. Freud represented desire, instinct, dream, association, neurosis, repression, repetition, the unconscious - all the central notions of psychoanalysis - as memory functions or dysfunctions. In his theory, the exercise of memory seeks to heal the same traumas whose capacity for disrupting our existence memory itself perversely sustains. This is memory\'s paradox in Freud, and it may be irresolvable.\n'