Fordham University

Chapter Title: Memory in Freud

Chapter Author(s): Richard Terdiman

Book Title: Memory

Book Subtitle: Histories, Theories, Debates
Book Editor(s): SUSANNAH RADSTONE, BILL SCHWARZ
Published by: Fordham University. (2010)
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 6. Memory in Freud

Richard Terdiman

When Freud set out to understand how memory worked in the psyche,
he wasn’t thinking about whether his ideas harmonized with the histori-
cal and cultural complex we know as ‘‘modernity.’’ But the theory of
memory that Freud developed puts his conception of memory at mo-
dernity’s heart.
In the modern period, memory seems caught in a distinctive form
of crisis. We could think of modernity’s ‘‘memory’’ as involving two
contrary mismatches between recollection and its object. Memory is
either frustrated by insufficiency, or it is cursed with exaggeration: too
little memory, or too much. Modernity is either haunted by the near-
impossibility of determining a reliable past, or it is burdened by the
compulsion to repeat a past we cannot shake off. Freud’s theory of
memory lives in these twin, uncomfortable misfits between the recol-
lecting faculty and the material it makes available to consciousness. This
unhappy dialectic might be the dilemma upon whose horns modernity
hangs us.

How does memory work in Freud? To begin with, it would be impossi-

ble to conceive the psyche if it did not incorporate a faculty for conserv-
ing and conceiving the past. From the beginning of his work Freud
insisted that the therapy he theorized and the theory he practiced sought
to understand memory. ‘‘A psychological theory deserving of any con-
sideration,’’ he wrote in 1895, early in his career, ‘‘must furnish an ex-
planation of ‘memory.’ ’’1 And he recognized that such an explanation
had been missing in psychology: ‘‘If anyone should feel inclined to over-
estimate the state of our present knowledge of mental life, a reminder
of the function of memory is all that would be needed to force him to
be more modest. No psychological theory has yet succeeded in giving a
connected account of the fundamental phenomenon of remembering
and forgetting.’’ (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life [1901]; SE 6:134).

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 RICHARD TERDIMAN

Freud’s preoccupation with memory proliferated and pervaded his psychological the-
ory, to the point where the individual almost seemed to have been reconceived as a cluster
of memory operations and transformations. Freud represented desire, instinct, dream, as-
sociation, neurosis, repression, repetition, the unconscious—all the central notions of psy-
choanalysis—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.
So memory came to stand both as the problem Freud sought to crack and as the key
to his solution to it. In his attempt to unravel memory’s complications, he magnified its
field, its centrality—and its ambivalence—more insistently and more powerfully than any
other theorist in the modern period. In psychoanalysis the density and intensity of atten-
tion to the phenomena of memory, forgetting, false memories, and the like, are evidence
of the power of the past. Memory names the mechanism by which our present is inden-
tured to the past; or, to turn the structure around, by which a past we never chose domi-
nates the present that seems to be the only place given us to live.
Yet the past is gone. It is always absent—this would seem its very definition. When we
try to narrate our past, most often we either get it wrong or we lie. The past may deter-
mine the present. But the problem for cultural or psychological theory is to understand
how in its absence and its impalpability it manages to do so. In Freudian terms, the
constraints imposed upon us by the past seem ‘‘uncanny.’’ Freud’s objective could then
be put this way: to discover how our past, despite being irretrievably absent, maintains
the power of its presence; and, to the extent possible, to devise means for undoing this
power.
Most of the time, the determinations of our past appear invisible. They constitute
our reality while remaining mostly transparent. This can lead us to ignore them. But in
those moments where some disturbance of this transparency becomes perceptible, then
suddenly the past no longer ‘‘goes without saying.’’ As he developed the theory of psycho-
analysis, these were the moments Freud’s attention detected and seized upon. In dreams,
in ‘‘slips’’ or what he termed ‘‘parapraxes,’’ in hysteria, and in the other transference
neuroses, the present unexpectedly stopped making sense and became inexplicable. To
explain such anomalies Freud discovered he could invoke a covert persistence of the past
and the determinations of a memory whose extent and intensity no one before him had
conceived as so ubiquitous or so imperious.
Where, then, is this past? How can we gain access to it? And how can its power be
managed? Early in Freud’s therapeutic work he decided to ‘‘start from the assumption
that my patients knew everything that was of any pathogenic significance and that it was
only a question of obliging them to communicate it’’ (Studies on Hysteria [1895]; SE
2:110). To achieve such communication, Freud’s method based itself upon dialogue. Con-
sequently in psychoanalysis, recollection is not just individual; it involves a system of two
people working together. But why should a memory that everything suggests is personal

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 MEMORY IN FREUD

require the midwifery of a psychoanalytic interlocutor to bring it to light? The answer

begins with Freud’s assertion that forgetting is not a random result of erosion or entropy,
but is purposeful conduct. But for Freud forgetting is a conduct performed without the
knowledge of its actor. Freud conceives of forgetting as something we’ve learned to do in
the service of some need. Thus it is a lived memory of a forgotten forgetting. Then the
analyst’s intervention is necessary in order to bring this forgetting back to light, and make
such troubling recollections accessible again.
How is this possible? Freud believed that such dialogic recollection could work be-
cause the therapist has a different memory and a different past from the patient’s and
hence is not bound to the reproduction of the patient’s blockage, nor to the recollected
forgetting that has determined it. Anamnesis, recollection, is dialogic because undoing
the pattern of failure to remember, subverting the false stability of mnemonic blockage,
requires the dynamism and the intervention of somebody else. Transference—to put the
point in Freudian terms—can only make sense within a relation of difference.2
Freud’s own memory was excellent. ‘‘I am not in general inclined to forget things,’’
he wrote in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (SE 6:135). Yet Freud’s memory was
subject to the same failures and mix-ups that everyone experiences. For example, the
phenomenon he termed ‘‘cryptomnesia’’—what we might translate as ‘‘forgetting with
advantage.’’ With his customary candor, Freud recounted his own commissions of this
lapse. For example he described how he had been brought by his friend Fliess to realize
that he had completely blotted out the memory that Fliess had introduced him to the
theory of ‘‘original bisexuality,’’ a theory that he then later played back to Fliess as if Freud
had devised it himself.3 For most of us, lapses such as these function only as annoyances or
embarrassments. But Freud hypothesized that they could be made intelligible.
The first significant result of his inquiry into ordinary experiences of memory loss
and degradation was his essay on ‘‘The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness’’ (1898),
which became the opening chapter of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Freud took
many of the analyses of mnemonic lapses in this study from his own experience, including
the classic case of his inability to recall the name of the painter of the Orvieto Last Judg-
ment frescoes.4 The result of his investigations strengthened Freud’s conviction that such
mental errors are always purposeful. So when Freud interpreted experiences of ‘‘forget-
ting,’’ he analyzed them not as simple memory drop-outs, but as blockages of recollection
determined by the psyche’s need to not remember something troubling. We could say
that these blockages then became memory-substitutes for unwanted recollections.
Memory lapses like the ones Freud analyzed in his work around the turn of the
century gave a microcosmic but crucial glimpse of the general mechanism by which mem-
ory, seemingly a benign and neutral ‘‘archive’’ of our experience (SE 3:296), could turn
pathological. Freud was explicit: ‘‘The example elucidated here [he is talking about his
own inability to recall Signorelli’s name] receives an immensely added interest when we

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 RICHARD TERDIMAN

learn that it may serve as nothing more or less than a model for the pathological processes
to which the psychical symptoms of the psychoneuroses . . . owe their origin’’ (SE 3:295).
This hypothesis has proven remarkably productive. Through its varied manifesta-
tions, psychoanalysis, along with a series of diverse interpretive systems inspired by it, has
been able to theorize entire areas of human phenomena that had seemed meaningless as
meaningful. Elements of behavior previously thought to be random or negative (for exam-
ple, the seemingly entropic disappearance of a memory trace) have been reconceived as
motivated, hence as comprehensible. This doctrine transforms forgetting from a flat ab-
sence into a rich positivity—into a version of remembrance. And it insists on the intimate
connection between the two, on their systematicity (see Psychopathology of Everyday Life,
SE 6:134). Before Freud, forgetting had seemed an event without a narrative, an inarticu-
late blank. But Freud insisted that in the psyche there could be no results without causes,
hence no denouements without stories. If forgetting resulted, there was a tale behind it.
At the same time, his theory offered an explanation of why the pertinent story about our
forgetting hadn’t been known to us all along—why it had, in effect, been forgotten.
To put his theory in motion, Freud projected a protagonist and a plot for the account
he was generating about forgetting. In effect he created a new narrative genre about the
process of the mind. The main protagonist in this narrative had emerged as early as 1895
in Studies on Hysteria, in Freud’s discussion of the analytic technique he had developed
in his work with hysterics. There, concerning the phenomenon of ‘‘pathogenic’’ forget-
ting, he wrote that such forgotten material ‘‘nevertheless in some fashion lies ready to
hand and in correct and proper order. . . . The pathogenic psychical material appears to
be the property of an intelligence which is not necessarily inferior to that of the normal
ego’’ (SE 2:287).
This new character was the unconscious, and the new story it wrote was the result of
what Freud termed repression. In the narrative of the psyche that Freud was composing,
these new entities functioned to withdraw from the ego’s possession important facts about
its perceptions, recollections, and behavior. In this new conception, the process of recol-
lection was crucially redefined, both in its necessity and its possibility. For while it now
appeared absolutely indispensable to recover the memories that the unconscious had
withdrawn from the accessible archive of memory, simultaneously and for the same rea-
son, this task of recovery emerged as profoundly problematic. For once we have an un-
conscious, where is our past? The paradox of Freudian construction of memory is that it
defined for this constitutive instance of our psyche—of our self—both an irreducible
presence and an infinite distance.
This paradoxical—we might say paralogistic—combination of presence and absence
frames a new situation for thinking. The modern world, many have argued, is constituted
by the ever-increasing mobility of everything that makes it up—not only material objects,

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 MEMORY IN FREUD

but language itself. Indeed in modernity, language’s lability comes to seem the most char-
acteristic condition of our existence; the sign becomes the model of everything that occu-
pies our attention and furnishes our world. But once signs begin to float and flow, things
become hard to restabilize. Where now is the ‘‘real’’? This semiotic puzzle—for example,
the deceptive verisimilitude, the apparent reality of our reference to or memories of the
nonexistent—had occupied Freud as early as the 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology.
There he asked how we can tell the difference between a presence and an absence. How
can we tell a memory of the past from an experience in the present? He wrote that we
need ‘‘an external criterion in order to distinguish between perception [Wahrnehmung]
and idea [Vorstellung]’’ or between ‘‘perception and memory’’ (SE 1:325; translation
modified).
Freud might have solved the problem of how we distinguish these two types of expe-
riences by collapsing objective and subjective reality into each other in some version of
Idealism. Then all psychic representations would become equivalent to all others, and the
materiality of the real object of perception—present in perception, absent in memory—
would have been bleached out. But Freud was an uncompromising materialist—
something that more recent Freudians, particularly of Lacanian stripe, have themselves
sometimes repressed. In the face of his encounter with the mind-body problem, Freud
concluded that not everything can be absorbed into the subjective paradigms of the psy-
che. Entities crucial for psychology nonetheless exist external to the psyche itself. These
entities are things.
The consequences of Freud’s epistemological choice are considerable. ‘‘What we call
things,’’ he wrote, ‘‘are externalities which resist thought’’ (Project for a Scientific Psychol-
ogy; SE 1:334; translation mine) [Was wir Dinge nennen, sind Reste, die sich der Beurteilung
entziehen]. The concept of such resistance is striking. As I suggested just above, it contrasts
with familiar positions in our own period, characterized by the relative dominance of
linguistic and semiotic paradigms, and—in the absence of extra-semiotic hors-texte—by
the idea that the world somehow collapses into such paradigms. Freud’s stance is differ-
ent. For him, ideas, memory traces, word- and thing-presentations, the imagined objects
of instinctual drives, fantasies, hallucinations—such psychic phenomena can imitate,
stand for, refer to, represent, even deny the world external to the self and independent of
its mental presentations. But unlike what would be the case in some of the most familiar
semiotic models of postmodernity, Freud was not willing to equate these representations
with the world outside the psyche. He insisted upon confirming the irreducibility of the
material objects that the psyche’s desires could evoke or react to, but not replace or
control. This ‘‘resistance’’ of things is critical in unexpected regions of Freudian theory,
as I will argue below.
But Freud’s refusal to blot the problem out by collapsing reality into the neurological
presentations available within the psyche only deepened the psychological puzzle he was

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 RICHARD TERDIMAN

setting for himself and for us. For in our experience—and particularly in the experience
of the hysteric and neurasthenic patients Freud was working with throughout this pe-
riod—the power of psychical presentations seemed to sweep away the reality of the mate-
rial world. Neurotics do behave as if their memories were real, as if material reality were
just an appearance and the mind’s phantoms and phantasms entirely determinant.
How could the difference between psychical and material reality be conceived in a
way that granted each of these registers its requisite independence while still managing to
leave conceptual room for the interactions and substitutions by which their distinction
seemed constantly subverted? And in particular, how could we understand—and how
alter—the spectral power of certain memory traces within the psyche, traces so powerful
that they appear so fully to displace the products of immediate perception that, as we say,
people under their influence ‘‘lose touch with reality’’?
We could restate Freud’s perplexity this way: Where does the ‘‘reality’’ of our memory
stop? When does recollection end and experience begin? In these questions lurks the prob-
lem of memory’s strange power. Psychoanalysis depends upon the subject’s memory for
the cure. But as Freud’s therapeutic experiences began to suggest, subjects’ memories most
often subjected them. The pertinence of this reversal of agency had arisen dramatically in
Freud and Breuer’s early attempts to treat hysteria. Their diagnosis in the ‘‘Preliminary
Communication’’ (1893) of the Studies on Hysteria concerning the etiology of this illness
is justly celebrated: ‘‘Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’’ (emphasis theirs; SE 2:7).
Memory was their illness.5
In this construction, the seemingly secure materiality of a world of the here-and-now
has been replaced by memory symbols whose power seems ineradicable and able to sup-
plant even the most intense experiences in the present. The memory of what cannot be
spoken still speaks, and it does so irresistibly. It imposes somatic avowal; the mind writes
it upon the body.6 The idea here, that ‘‘truth will out,’’ may be familiar. Freud’s originality
was to specify the source and the mechanism by which such involuntary re-materializa-
tions of the hidden occur. This source was the unconscious; the mechanism, the return
of the repressed. In order to understand the extraordinary expansion of the memory
function in psychoanalysis, we need to understand how, for Freud, these psychic agencies
preserve and, at crucial moments, ‘‘betray’’ the past.
Conceptualizing this process and the consequences of this conservation and re-mate-
rialization of the past drove the mature theory of psychoanalysis toward a reconception
of the nature of psychological ‘‘evidence’’ and of the paradigms necessary for its interpre-
tation. Freud had to credit the seeming sovereignty of representations such as those which
involuntarily ‘‘ooze out’’ in neuroses or are acted out in hysteria—and he had to credit
these behaviors not as unintelligible aberrations, but as products of the regular function-
ing of psychic processes. ‘‘What is suppressed continues to exist in normal people as well as
abnormal, and remains capable of psychical functioning’’ (Freud’s emphasis; Interpretation
of Dreams [1900]; SE 5:608).

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 MEMORY IN FREUD

To the naı̈ve observer, the memories that irrupt from we know not where to overturn
our present seem intolerable. Their re-materializations violate the canons by which our
world is supposed to be ordered and call out for normalization. Indeed, the psychoana-
lytic patient has entered treatment precisely to eliminate them. But Freud made it a princi-
ple to forestall taking the perspective of the treatment’s end—the suppression of
pathological recurrence of these memory contents—in conceiving its material and its
course. Epistemologically speaking, it was as if achieving control over these archaic con-
tents required abandoning our everyday realist bias, and adopting the point of view of
memory itself.
But what was the character of this ‘‘memory’’? To understand Freud’s perspective, it
is essential to abandon any ‘‘realist’’ notion of the memory that we can access as some
form of reliable ‘‘storage’’—memory as checked baggage which could be reclaimed at any
time.7 Such a notion carries the implication that what went into the brain is stored some-
place specific within it, and can be retrieved unchanged. Freud’s vision was contrary to
such a notion. As he put it early in his career, ‘‘There is in general no guarantee of the
data produced by our memory’’ (‘‘Screen Memories’’ [1899]; SE 3:315).8
For Freud the stakes in the tension between what we might term on the one hand
literalist and on the other interpretive representations of the past were critical. And they
arose at a crucial moment in the development of his paradigm—one that evokes a contro-
versy still burning within Freudianism: the problem of ‘‘seduction theory.’’ Early in his
career, in one of his most startling hypotheses, Freud speculated that what he was then
calling ‘‘neurasthenia’’ (neurosis) resulted from an experience of childhood sexual moles-
tation. In the course of therapy, his patients had regularly produced recollections of such
experiences.
But in 1897 he began to be convinced that these accounts were likely to have arisen
instead from what he termed ‘‘phantasies’’—imaginary constructions, into whose forma-
tion the proportions of projection, invention, recollection, misrecollection, and retroflex-
ive reconstruction were simply undecidable. But if this was true, there was no master
memory. In the revision of the theory entailed by Freud’s renunciation of belief in his
patients’ remembrance of early molestation, the entire field of the diagnostic data of
psychoanalysis was sweepingly reinterpreted; the very notion of ‘‘data’’ was radically
transformed.9 The transformation that disbelieved the reality of early seduction of the
child but credited the effect of the patient’s conviction concerning it unlinked the mne-
monic representations elicited in treatment from literal reproduction of past experiences.
This move created the interpretive field in which mature psychoanalysis functions.
Such reconception of the status of the issues and the evidence to which the analyst must
attend—now no longer concerned with establishing the factual accuracy of the memories
produced by his patients, but rather seeking interpretation of the representations they
offered—is crucial to the vision of psychoanalysis that underlies Freud’s radical resitua-
tion of the memory problem.

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 RICHARD TERDIMAN

We can’t remember the future. Only our past can be invoked in recollection. But if
we can’t represent the directionality of memory’s determinations, there can be no possi-
bility of understanding how the past it carries forward with it has come to dominate our
present. Making sense of memory requires that this directionality be central within any
representation of memory’s activity. But then the theory of psychoanalysis runs into a
serious difficulty. When we come to psychology from the side of memory, it is memory’s
persistence, the seeming inertia of its traces, that calls out for explanation.
The locus of memory in Freud’s topography of the psyche attempts to understand
this refractory fixity. He conceived the unconscious as the timeless and immutable portion
of the psyche. For psychoanalysis, the unconscious is memory’s fundamental repository.10
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. They are recorded in the unconscious, but only
their derivatives, the ‘‘screen memories’’ and so on, are available to consciousness as part
of the tactics by which repression protects itself. So functionally, what psychoanalysis
means by memory—the traces of the past determinant for the pathologies that psychoan-
alytic therapy seeks to alleviate—is unconscious memory strictly defined, the memory of
the mysterious, timeless system Ucs.11 And despite the paradoxical counterintuitiveness of
the position, Freud was undeviating in his doctrine that system Ucs. conserves the past
literally, timelessly, and permanently.
There can be no doubt that Freud believed firmly in these characteristics of the un-
conscious, however difficult it may be for us to imagine how such a position could make
sense. He asserted his credo on the timelessness and permanence of the unconscious and
its memories from one end of his career to the other. From his essay ‘‘The Unconscious’’
(1915): ‘‘The processes of the system Ucs. are timeless; i.e. they are not ordered temporally,
are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all’’ (SE 14:187).12
The repressed contents whose traces occupy system Ucs. then appear as the source of the
pathologies that preoccupy psychoanalysis. The memories that are crucial for understand-
ing Freud’s conception of pathology become available only when they somehow pierce
through the boundary surrounding system Ucs., where their ineradicable traces are lo-
cated. He understood their frustrating persistence in consciousness and in behavior as a
direct result of their permanence in the psyche. That is why it is so hard to change the
behaviors that they determine, why the psychoanalytic cure is so protracted.
This brings us to a fundamental and perhaps intractable problem in Freudian theory.
It arises in his unprecedented and counterintuitive insistence on the permanence and
ineradicability of memories in the unconscious. Many have argued that Freud’s concep-
tion of psychic contents turns from a model based upon the literalism of data to one
deploying the more supple practices of interpretation. But the timeless and immutable
inscriptions of the unconscious, the unchanging memory registrations of system Ucs.,
create a tension within this understanding of Freud. How can we reconcile the paradigm

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 MEMORY IN FREUD

of protean interpretive mobility that is usually thought to define Freudian psychoanalysis

with the quasi-positivist concept of the unconscious’s unchangeable register of every fact
that has ever occurred in an individual’s experience?
In the past few decades, with Lacan particularly, structuralist and semiotic models
have increasingly dominated conceptions of Freudian psychoanalysis. But Freud’s con-
ception of an immutable unconscious memory, the refractory registrations of system Ucs.
upon which he insisted, create a problem for such models. The almost effortless and
mobile transfers of meaning that characterize semiotic systems don’t fit comfortably
within the logic of memory as Freud conceived it, don’t cohere with Freud’s timeless
and unchanging unconscious. For at the heart of a paradigm of luxuriant and seemingly
boundless interpretation, the unconscious is a realm of facts. This projection of psychic
fixity discomfits semiotic theories of the mind and memory.
So despite Lacan’s resonant assertion, the Freudian unconscious isn’t structured pre-
cisely like a language. Indeed, it rather functions as something like language’s contrary.
For in the memory registrations of the timeless unconscious as Freud hypothesizes it, no
content ever stands for any other. Instead, each stands uniquely and immutably for itself.
This produces a puzzling result. In the unconscious, because there can be no change, there
can be no signs. How can we make sense of this?
The tension here lies between two irreconcilable modes of being. Language and semi-
otics model the first of these modes. In it, existence is characterized by the mutability
with which language accommodates transformations of the meaning-system in which it
is embedded. Language can stand indifferently for whatever you like. And this compliance
of the linguistic material, this unfixity defines the sign: it can be anything, and substitute
for anything. But this description of the wanton lability of the semiotic—‘‘compliance
of the linguistic material’’—is in fact Freud’s own characterization for the contents of
consciousness (Psychopathology of Everyday Life; SE 6:222). And it invites confrontation
with his directly contrasting evocation of the thought-resistant materiality of things (SE
1:334) that I mentioned earlier.
Here then is the principle that defines the tension in the Freudian model of memory
and interpretation: Language is compliant; but things are resistant. By his own unvarying
account, the contents of the Freudian unconscious resist change as if they were ‘‘things.’’
In the face of modernist and postmodern constructions of reality as a projection of
language, Freud asserts a different understanding. At the heart of his model, the timeless
unconscious hides a resistant materialist foundation that nothing seems able to alter.
The contents of the unconscious cannot have the character of a sign because they do
not have its mobility. It is not that the traces that occupy the unimaginable space of
Freud’s system Ucs. can replace nothing else. It is rather that nothing can replace them.
They cannot be signified; they are a memory that never forgets and thus is never altered.
The past they carry is not past at all. This is what makes the issue of the cure so arduous
for psychoanalysis.

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 RICHARD TERDIMAN

The unconscious conserves everything. The problem lies in what happens to those inerad-
icable contents. In his essay ‘‘The Unconscious’’ (1915), Freud asked what occurs when
an unconscious memory becomes conscious (see SE 14:174 and n. 29). The question is,
how are unconscious traces transmuted into conscious signs? This metamorphosis is cru-
cial. For clearly the remainder of the psyche manipulates its contents as if they were
indeed semiotic elements. But this means that the contents of consciousness exist in a
different ontological mode from those of the unconscious. If we can’t understand this
passage from one mode of memory to another, the role and character of the unconscious
becomes unfathomable. Then system Ucs., which Freud considered the ‘‘true psychical
reality’’ (Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5:613), the heart of his model of the psyche and his
most original contribution to our understanding of it, risks absolute incomprehensibility.
The split in the psyche is a chasm between the semiotic and its other. The question
of this border is the question of psychotherapy itself. Freud himself was deeply troubled
by it. Early in his career he evoked it thus: ‘‘It is . . . as though we were standing before a
wall which shuts out every prospect and prevents us from having any idea whether there
is anything behind it, and if so, what’’ (‘‘Psychotherapy of Hysteria’’ [1895], SE 2:293).
This is only an early member of a long series of images through whose figures Freud
sought to describe what the mind was like behind this wall, to understand the unimagin-
able parallel universe of the unconscious, and to discover how this ‘‘internal foreign terri-
tory’’ of which he spoke in 1933 in the New Introductory Lectures could be understood
(SE 22:57).
The paradox of the psychoanalytic cure now becomes apparent. The power of uncon-
scious memories arises in the fact that we are not free not to live them. Clearly the uncon-
scious memory traces at the source of a neurotic symptom produce ‘‘output’’ to the rest
of the psyche. The problem is that they may produce only this. In the state in which they
were laid down, they may be inaccessible to input, moderation, modulation, or diminu-
tion. Or if not, how could these modifications of unconscious contents happen? How can
the unconscious be both changeless and changeable? To cure neurosis necessarily means
acting upon the archaic registrations lying at its source, which the unconscious has inte-
grally conserved. The problem is to imagine how this could occur. For if the unconscious
is timeless and immutable, if memories are inexorably fixed, it would seem difficult to
conceive how any activity taking place outside it could interrupt or modify them.
This puzzlement—indeed, this apparent contradiction in the model of unconscious
memory that Freud devised and remained committed to—is at the origin of the growing
pessimism he expressed toward the end of his career concerning the therapeutic ambitions
of psychoanalysis itself. His theory itself entailed this reserve. It is particularly visible in
‘‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’’ (1937). The editors of the Standard Edition take
note of the gloom Freud expressed in the essay concerning the possibility of the cure (see
SE 23:211). What is striking in the analysis offered in the essay is a convergence between
the sources of Freud’s hesitations concerning its possibility, and an unconscious whose

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 MEMORY IN FREUD

difference from the other portions of the psyche is so radical that its contents exist in an
alternate ontological mode.
Analysis can only cure by some form of memory displacement or substitution. Patho-
logical memory determinations must be replaced by healthy ones. The formula in which
Freud made this point is famous: ‘‘Where id was,’’ he wrote, ‘‘there ego shall be’’ (New
Introductory Lectures [1933]; SE 22:80) [Wo Es war, soll Ich werden]. But when I asked
earlier whether the contents of the unconscious (or the ‘‘id’’) could be the object of
replacement, could be substituted for and thus fulfill the function of signs, the response
from within Freud’s system was disconcerting. Such a substitution appeared impossible if
the timeless character of unconscious contents upon which Freud never ceased insisting
was not to be fatally compromised.
The origin of neurosis in the changeless unconscious then appeared hermetically
sealed off from any access to or treatment by the talking cure. In its struggle to overcome
the source of pathology, psychoanalysis in effect attempts to oppose the force of matter
with words, to set signs against materiality. It is not surprising that in the face of such a
mismatch, in ‘‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’’ Freud substantially lowered the
ambitions of the cure. In particular, with regard to the source of the symptom (what he
called the ‘‘instinctual demand’’), he made it clear that there was little prospect of the
treatment’s eliminating it. ‘‘This,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is in general impossible.’’ Rather, he contin-
ued, ‘‘we mean something else, something which may be roughly described as a ‘taming’
[Bändigung] of the instinct. That is to say, the instinct is brought completely into the
harmony of the ego’’ (SE 23:225).
But despite this substitute version of how the talking cure might cure, the problem
may remain irreducible within Freud’s structure of the psyche. The cure projects some-
thing that psychoanalysis suggests may be impossible: replacement or extinction of an
unconscious trace. The theoretical energy Freud devoted, from one end of his career to
the other, to establishing the timelessness and the stability of the memories in the uncon-
scious then rebounded at the moment of the cure to subvert any coherent account of its
possibility.
In this way, the photographic, ‘‘eidetic’’ memory that Freud attributed to the uncon-
scious and by which it achieves total preservation of the past mutates into memory’s
nightmare. For what is repressed in the unconscious, what is denied entry into conscious-
ness and cut off from development, nonetheless remains banefully active. In the uncon-
scious, such memories become exempt from extinction. The unconscious is the unerring
repository of our past; but its disheartening privilege is to conserve those contents most
harmful to us (or at least to our conscious selves) in a place where their toxicity cannot
diminish.

Such a conundrum embraces the extremes of Freud’s construction of memory, which

span a range unprecedented in modernity. The conflict between memory as the absolute

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 RICHARD TERDIMAN

reproduction of unchanging contents and memory as the mobile representation of contents

transformed stresses and might really be said to construct Freudian analytic theory. On
the one hand Freud’s insistence upon the absence of loss in the mnemonic world of the
unconscious can be interpreted as a paroxysm of the reproductive model of memory—too
much memory, to reproduce the first side of the modernist memory dialectic that I evoked
at the opening of this essay. The totalizing retention and recovery of the past has never
been conceived more radically than Freud did in his conception of the unconscious. On
the other hand, we can’t recall these memories—too little memory, the other side of the
dialectic with which I began.
To put this in the terms that Freud’s model constructs for us, Freud interprets the
vertiginously changing manifestations and transformations of psychic contents as a form
of continuous and uninterrupted recollection. This theory provides us with the most
sophisticated paradigm of mnemonic representation yet devised. But we never get back
to the real registration of our past. The extremes to which Freud felt it necessary to go in
order to embrace the protean diversity and power of memory’s presence in our lives seem
to have led him to a structure so internally stressed that it appears capable of no resolution
at all. If so, psychoanalysis preserves the enigma of memory as tenaciously as any trace in
the timeless and immutable unconscious that it conceives as the repository of memory to
begin with.
In Freud memory thus lives in a contradiction framed by psychoanalytic topography.
In ‘‘The Unconscious’’ (1915), he sought to understand how a relation between the two
memory systems he had projected might be modeled (see particularly SE 14:188–89). The
problem is not that such a relationship across the border between the unconscious and
consciousness is impossible, since such passages must happen—they are the experience of
every minute of our lives. The problem is that Freud was unable to give a coherent ac-
count of how this relationship occurs.
Existence does not depend upon our ability to theorize it in order to happen. But for
Freud’s theory the difficulty remains. Whatever the eerie fixity of the registrations pre-
served in unconscious memory, in consciousness recollection exhibits a positively wanton
disjunction from the veridical. There seems no seduction before which its representations
will not yield. If the unconscious theorized by Freud contains an absolute, uncannily inert
and stable record of the past, on its side consciousness exhibits a vertiginous representa-
tional mobility in the memories of which we are permitted awareness. The problem of
characterizing memory mutates from fixity to fluidity, from absolute and inaccessible fact
to ever-shifting fiction. I want to conclude this essay by examining these uncontainable
and unpredictable remembrances of a memory we cannot remember.
In its protean volatility, conscious memory proliferates and diffuses extravagantly.
The theory of memory thus reaches a critical pass. The psychic life we experience or can
observe directly is a perpetual movement of transformations and substitutions—ordered,
determined perhaps, but potentially interminable. As Freud put it in ‘‘The Dynamics of

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 MEMORY IN FREUD

Transference’’ (1912), ‘‘Unconscious impulses do not want to be remembered in the way

the treatment desires them to be, but endeavor to reproduce themselves in accordance
with the timelessness of the unconscious and its capacity for hallucination’’ (SE 12:108).
But once we are willing to allow hallucination as a mode of meaning, then psychoanalysis
has committed itself to resolving heroic problems in interpretation.
The untrammeled play of exchanges and transformations of meaning that psycho-
analysis projects as the business of conscious memory subverts the coherence through
time and the reality-check that memory was long supposed to provide. Recollection in-
stead appears as a hypocritical counterfeiter. Henceforth, in a vision that has had great
influence since Freud’s own period, remembering means changing. ‘‘Like the physical, the
psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be’’ (‘‘The Unconscious’’;
SE 14:171). Thus in the psyche, everything moves. Derrida emphasized this point: ‘‘The
substitution of signifiers seems to be the essential activity of psychoanalytic interpreta-
tion.’’13 In psychic material, things keep changing into other things. A readiness to per-
ceive this constitutive lability and plasticity, to consider it as the zero-degree reality in
the psyche, is fundamental to Freudian hermeneutics, to the scheme of psychoanalytic
interpretation.
As I already suggested in mentioning Lacan above, reinterpretations of Freud along
semiotic or Saussurian lines have preoccupied important strands of critical theory for
decades.14 We have become familiar with the notion that the Freudian model of a seem-
ingly uncontainable displacement of significations bears a persuasive similarity to the
structures of sign generation and interpretation as they became conceptualized in the
period when Freud’s own theory was being systematized (Saussure’s celebrated lectures
took place between 1906 and 1911). It almost seems as if semiotics was dreaming up
psychoanalysis at the same time as Freud himself.
The investigation of memory in Freud thus seems to swerve away from the character
and practices of memory itself toward an account of the nature of Freudian interpretation.
But this apparent inflection from the realm of memory to the realm of interpretation is
not an inflection at all. The problems of memory and of interpretation in Freud are
inseparable. Indeed, this coincidence may well be one of the most important characteris-
tics of conceptions of memory in modernity, in which the subjective character of recollec-
tion underlines and foregrounds the subjectivity of all human beings and doings.
Still, how do these two registers—the mnemonic and the hermeneutic—unfold and
intertwine in Freud’s theory? Freudian interpretation is fundamentally genealogical. It
means excavating the successive strata of the psyche. And it believes that the contents
thus brought to light can be made sense of. However arduous in practice, Freud thus
conceives interpretation as a realist act. It then becomes simple to say how the problem
of memory relates to the problem of interpretation. We need hermeneutics when memory
in the mode of faithful reproduction fails: when the transparency of our access to the

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 RICHARD TERDIMAN

meanings transmitted to us from the past (‘‘memory as checked baggage’’) is troubled

or interrupted.
Psychoanalysis then must reconstruct the meaning of an entity, the psyche, whose
meanings are not given on the surface of its own recollection. But as Freud made clear in
‘‘Constructions in Analysis,’’ psychoanalysis can only do this as a reconstruction. It per-
forms the interpretive equivalent of ‘‘reverse engineering’’: given a product (the symp-
tom), it seeks to understand how the product came to be, how it was made. It walks back
up the chain of memories, of relations and transformations that in their accumulated
effects produced the psyche it strives to understand.
The axiom of the interpretive system deployed in psychoanalysis is that some content
is always remembered—retained, transferred, disguised—across even the most vertigi-
nous mutations undergone by representations within the psyche. These transfers inevita-
bly center in memory, instantiate its processes, and convey its materials. As for the
interpretive activity of psychoanalysis, of course it has no other content than memories
to work with. ‘‘We have to do our therapeutic work on [the present state of the patient’s
illness], which consists in large measure in tracing it back to the past’’ (‘‘Remembering,
Repeating, and Working-Through’’ [1914], SE 12:152). This hermeneutic exercise is a
fundamental process of anamnesis, of recollection.
In this sense Freud’s attitude lies at the heart of modernity’s vision of the world as a
deeply coded message awaiting decipherment. The disciplines that have arisen since the
nineteenth century for understanding human behavior in its multiform aspects (among
them sociology, anthropology, and—most consequential for us here—psychology) have
all sought interpretation of mysteries in modern existence that refuse to give up their
meanings to naı̈ve inspection. These emergent disciplines speculated upon hidden barriers
to understanding. In effect each projected the same second-guessing of subjectivity or
dethroning of consciousness that Freudian psychoanalysis practices.15
But here a problem arises. For once the rewriting of the object of interpretation
begins, once transfer, transposition, what Freud termed Umsetzung (New Introductory
Lectures [1933], SE 22:100–101) are accepted as legitimate for understanding the object’s
real meaning, then it becomes difficult to see how to limit such revisions. The hermeneu-
tics of suspicion maintains that things do not mean what they say. But then the difficulty
becomes knowing whether they might not mean anything at all. The problem is that once
you say that some meaning is transformed into some other meaning, the question arises
of how you know where to stop.16
This problem underlies reflection throughout Freud’s career. He acknowledged it in
a forthright and crucial passage in The Interpretation of Dreams: ‘‘The dream-thoughts to
which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite
endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of
our world of thought’’ (SE 5:525). In one of his last essays, the difficulty that this bound-
lessness poses appears in the form of a deceptively simple question. Freud asked how we

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 MEMORY IN FREUD

could know when an analysis is finished. From the point of view of the theory and practice
of psychoanalytic interpretation, the puzzlement implicit in the title of this celebrated
paper—‘‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’’ (1937, SE 23:216–53) [Die endliche und
die unendliche Analyse]—identifies a problem that may be incapable of solution within
the hermeneutic system Freud devised. Indeed, no hermeneutics of suspicion may be able
to resolve it.
Psychoanalysis combats the anguish of memory’s fallibility by offering the security of
interpretation. Interpretation settles the seeming limitlessness of association; it claims to
make sense of memories and make memory sensible. The uncontrollable exchange of
everything that comes up in recollection finds its antidote in the projection of some specific
thing that arrests the vertigo and aims to reestablish the present as a site of memory-
stability. But what founds such restabilization itself? The chain of logic underlying the
Freudian interpretive enterprise rests upon two principles whose function is to insure
intelligibility and interpretive boundedness: that chance is not to be credited in psychic
life, and that the unconscious memory is eternal. The first of these principles warrants
the interpretive chain offered by the analyst; the second provides the ground legitimizing
such chains. The past is thus recaptured for the present. And it is managed in such a way
that its impenetrability for this present is resolved or at least diminished.
The problem is to find a foundation that could limit the slippage of significations in
order to locate a point where meaning stabilizes, instead of simply repeating its protean
referral to yet another substitute signifier in the chain of interpretive rewritings. If it is
not to risk incoherence, every interpretive system must appeal to such a foundation.
Freud concentrated upon three touchstones that might stabilize the profusion of memo-
ries-turning-into-other-memories that the patient’s associations present in psychoanalytic
treatment: (1) the projection of an ultimate ground upon which all interpretations must
be based; (2) the hypothesis of a general lexicon of psychic symbolism that could poten-
tially make interpretation a version of ‘‘translation,’’ and provide an objective control
upon it; (3) the hypothesis that interpretation can be verified by the patient’s reaction to
it. Each of these principles or heuristics poses problems of its own, and Freud never settled
on one to the exclusion of the others.17
This fundamental uncertainty concerning how to end interpretation—how to decide
which memory in the seemingly endless chain of transformed recollections from the pa-
tient’s past is to be privileged above the others in determining that past’s meaning—turns
the question of psychoanalytic interpretation into an endless argument. ‘‘Is there such a
thing as a natural end to an analysis—is there any possibility at all of bringing an analysis
to such an end?’’ Freud framed the question in ‘‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’’
(1937; SE 23:219). His investigation found analysis stressed between postulates of absolute
meaningfulness on the one hand, and absolute mobility of meaning on the other. Stated
thus, the problem seems to take the form of a logical antinomy. Freud is forthright in
declaring that the theoretical ideal of complete understanding cannot be achieved.18

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 RICHARD TERDIMAN

The problem of memory might appear to have been forgotten in this discussion. But
here it resurfaces strategically. Why does psychoanalysis take so long? This protraction in
time is one of the aspects of Freudian psychology that everyone knows about. How can
we—how does Freud—explain why this laborious process of analysis can last over many
years? It is memory that foregrounds the crucial factor of time that might seem to have
gone missing in this last portion of my discussion.
Memory is how the mind knows time and registers change. In a tantalizing note in
‘‘On Narcissism’’ (1914) Freud speculated that the two faculties—remembering the past
and perceiving time—developed together in the psyche. He considered the faculty of self-
observation that arises in consciousness as their common source: ‘‘I should like to add to
this . . . , that the developing and strengthening of this observing agency might contain
within it the subsequent genesis of (subjective) memory and the time-factor’’ (SE 14:96
n. 1). Memory is why psychoanalysis takes time.
Yet for all this apparent centering of psychoanalytic meaning in memory, memory’s
contradiction subsists. Indeed it has only grown more anxious as psychoanalysis has
forced our understanding of the presence of the past further and deeper than ever before.
In psychoanalysis memory, while everywhere, is lost forever in an unconscious we can
neither access nor change. And understanding, whose ambiguous but intimate links to
the contents of the past conserved in memory this essay has sought to suggest, has become
the most persistent puzzle of modernity. In Freud, memory has entirely filled the psyche.
Yet it has disappeared within us. Psychoanalysis then seems a catastrophization of the
mnemonic anxieties that preoccupy our age, a paroxysm of the crisis we experience in
our vexed and unsettled relationship with the past.

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