Time and Memory

Rosine Jozef Perelberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429923029
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The concern with time permeates Freud's work, from Studies on Hysteria to Analysis Terminable and Interminable, which point out to a network of concepts that indicate Freud's complex theories on temporality. Indeed no other psychoanalytic thinker has put forward such revolutionary vision on the dimensions of time in human existence. This volume brings together some of the most important papers written on the topic by members of the British Psychoanalytical Society. In the richness of the detailed clinical discussions the ways in which patients deal with time and memory are viewed as crucial indications about their internal world and ways of relating to their objects. Disorientation regarding time tends to reflect levels of disruption to internal object relationships, inability to mourn or to experience guilt. Examples from literature and history are considered in order to examine the power of the repetition compulsion - Nachtreglichkeit - as well as how the impossibility of bearing the mental pain can lead to the creation of a timeless world.

CHAPTER ONE
The construction of heterochrony¹

André Green

Was there ever a point in Freud's work when he was not concerned by the subject of time? One would be justified in doubting it.

Before psychoanalysis

One must begin with his works as a biologist for, in them, anatomy is considered from an evolutionary angle; more specifically, his works are situated within the perspective of the migrations of certain cellular formations in the course of phylogenesis (1990, p. 146).² This initial orientation was later abandoned in favour of psychopathology, but the general questions raised by his research remained present in his mind. In Studies on Hysteria (1895d), the idea of “strangulated affect”, in other words, of the clock that has stopped, is already linked to the idea of time blocked by fixation— a movement frozen along a path evolving in time. Furthermore, in “The psychotherapy of hysteria”, the chapter he contributed to the work written in collaboration with Breuer (1895d), he put forward a complex model of temporality of great originality and marvellous ingenuity. In it we can find the notions of trauma, “filed” concentric layers of memory and radial side-paths, which clearly show his concern for a complex temporal ensemble raising the hypothesis of transchronic functioning—all of which is represented from a synchronic perspective, corresponding to time in psychotherapy.

Nachträglichkeit (S.E. "deferred action")

It was in the “Project” (1895a) that Freud expounded the theory of Nachträglichkeit for the first time. The case history of Emma has been recounted so many times that it is scarcely necessary to return to it. Let me attempt instead to give a theoretical exposition of the situation. Let us consider a symptom formed by a constellation of characteristics (Sn). Some of these characteristics refer directly to the memory of a scene (Sc I), which sheds light on only certain aspects of the symptom. The connection between the symptom and the memory of the initial scene may be said to be preconscious³ (conscious–pre-conscious association). Subsequently, Sc I is associated with Sc II, which occurred a few years before and was completely absent from the mind at the time of Sc I, itself occurring later in time. It can therefore be said that the connection between Sc II and the symptom (Sn) is not conscious, but unconscious. The idea that needs to be grasped here is that there is no direct link between the symptom and the unconscious memory; the latter only manifests itself retroactively by means of the preconscious memory that gives access to it. Sc I now needs to be linked up with Sc II (the first is post-pubertal and the second pre-pubertal). Sc II (enacted seduction) was accompanied by a sensation of sexual pleasure (which is why, after taking flight, the child would try to reproduce this seduction by putting herself in the same circumstances, but this time the pleasure would be sexual/libidinal). In Sc II we find some of the same elements as in Sc I, which are of secondary importance, or whose isolated and partial character do not allow elucidation of the symptom. Moreover, in Sc I there was a sexual release of the postpubertal kind, different in nature from the pre-pubertal sexual pleasure of Sc II. The displacement of the sign of the sexual assault via the clothes on to the clothes themselves provides the explanation for the conscious association, making the latter a prominent feature of the symptom, in a rationalized form. The memory of Sc II aroused in Sc I “what it was certainly not able to at the time, which was transformed into anxiety” (Freud, 1895a, p. 354).

In his analysis of the scenes, Freud showed that only the element “clothes”, common to both scenes, had entered consciousness. The associative links between the two scenes would reveal the meaningful unconscious content responsible for the late sexual discharge that continued to be linked with the memory of the assault. “But it is highly noteworthy that it [the sexual release] was not linked to the assault when this was experienced” (ibid., p. 356). In conclusion: the memory induces an affect emanating from the trauma itself. Freud returned to this problem in detail in the “Wolf Man”, when he discussed the date of the primal scene and its subsequent return in disguised forms. Its occurrence leaves its mark on the child who witnesses it, yet he cannot know the effect it will have on his subjectivity because he does not fully understand the way in which he has been affected by it. For this, the effects of post-pubertal sexuality at the two levels of accession to sexual maturity and intellectual development are necessary.

In 1899–1900, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), Freud put forward the conception of the bi-directional nature of psychical processes. Progressively and regressively, cathexes traverse the psychic space between its perceptual and motor poles, which are locked, in a movement back and forth that gives rise regressively to the representability specific to dreams. The hypothesis of the timelessness of the unconscious, which is nothing more than the timelessness of its traces and of its cathexes, endowed with mobility, is already present here. This means that the psychical apparatus is caught in the double vectorization tending now towards the future, now towards the past, in the pure present of dreaming, when the flow of excitations that should lead from thought to action is impossible. Freud mentions two types of reference to time: the first recognizes the signs of its passing and draws the appropriate conclusions; the second resists them, managing not to take them into account, facilitated once again by regression induced through sleep. Furthermore, in both cases, since there is grédience⁴ there is transition, that is to say, sequentiality capable of moving in both directions, although, as the paths of motoricity are not operative, this gives rise to the specific mobility of unconscious psychic space. In the context, the psychical processes are forced to follow a regressive path in order to be accomplished. However, this flow does not signify that meaning always follows a path from what comes first to what comes after; sometimes, says Freud, dreams even show the rabbit chasing the hunter. In any case, the situation of a chase is there. To demonstrate this, he points to the topographical regression of dreams, to be distinguished from temporal regression. It is not so much a case of returning to a constituted past as to outdated modes of expression. Hence, the twofold meaning of the denomination: they are primary processes, less differentiated than secondary processes, and earlier than them. If the process is called primary, it is because it corresponds to a psychic order that is considered to have existed first but which, owing to the evolution that has occurred, is scarcely present in consciousness, or so it appears. The idea that is fruitful here is that of regression, which does not occur on a massive scale, en bloc, but which selectively affects formal processes, arousing fueros, that is to say, reserves of meaning, of content, at certain moments, whereas, in other cases, it is more global, entailing an expressive and structural return resulting in a real resurgence of a time that one thought belonged to the past,as in the dynamic regrsion of psychosis, for example. In dreaming, although it is expressive regression (formal, concerning the form of figures and the way they are related to each other) that dominates, it cannot be said that this is the only manifestation of a temporal reference, since Freud considers that dreams refer back to an infantile scene which is modified by being transposed into a recent context. Time, however, only affects the childhood scene, referred to allusively, and its pictorial mode of expression; its actor—or its author—is not transported completely into the past. He sees the scene again profoundly disguised by the dream-work, without recognizing the sources. The reign of images is contrasted with that of language (topographical regression). The astonishing discovery was that, in their own way, images “think”. Actually, dreams “neither think nor calculate” says Freud, they just transform (in accordance with wishes). But is this not to recognize that wishing is also a way of thinking—thoughts that think themselves, as Lacan said. It is the effect of a wishful world that is more at ease in the logic of thing-representations because representation can represent the wish as accomplished; that is to say, anticipation is disguised by the forms taken by the emergence of the manifest content experienced in the present. Wishful thinking cannot be separated from its accomplishment and its “realization”: “... it [dream-work] is completely different from it [waking thought] qualitatively and for that reason not immediately comparable with it” (Freud, 1900a, p. 507).

With The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b),Freud decompartmentalized the discovery of the unconscious: it was no longer confined to the clinical study of patients’ neuroses or even to the way each one of us produces dreams under the specific conditions of sleep. Each day, the unconscious “signals its presence” in the waking life of all human beings and no longer belongs to just one register, whether of pathology or of dreams. It is present in scenes of forgetting, slips of the tongue, parapraxes, etc. There is no mention of regression here of any kind. The diachronic reference is suspended in favour of extending the scope of the synchronic register, leading to the heterogeneity of the signifier. It is a punctuation that would find its place when the problems of time were reconsidered in relation to representation. Symbolization would have the task of articulating the various registers of the signifying heterogeneity.

The return to biological foundations: sexuality

Dreaming is an experience bearing witness to the elaboration of desire, but this can scarcely be conceived without referring, in the last instance, to the activation of libidinal experience. The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d) laid the foundations for the aspect of temporality which was to enjoy the greatest success; no doubt because the iconoclastic value of Freud’s text resided in its new content, but also because the thought articulating it was familiar and easily applicable. It was the thought of ordinary time apprehended intuitively, following the curve of the life-cycle which is immediately accessible to understanding: birth, childhood, puberty and adolescence, adulthood, old age, and death.

We can see how Freud’s thought was swinging back and forth. Dreams had enabled him to discover a dismembered temporality, his initial intuition of non-unified time. The sexual theory returned to a time ordered traditionally, that is, in terms of the growth characteristic of life. The novelty here consisted in placing the sexual under the aegis of present time, long before its explicit manifestation after puberty, and in drawing attention to the intervention of repression in infantile amnesia, while opening the way for a return of the repressed. Thus, having returned to the long-familiar vectorized notion of time, thought was now enticed by the idea of a mode of dismantling of which it had been unaware and which was capable of challenging the idea of a past that, once past, is completely over, only reappearing under the pale hues of conscious memory. Freud was struck by the amnesia affecting the first years of life. Thus, he introduced the new category of repression, thereby relativizing his ostensible return to the notion of temporal succession assumed to govern the development of the libido. But, unlike in dreams, what has to be repressed here is neither wishes that it would have been better not to have formed, nor fantasies expressing prohibited desires, nor “wicked thoughts”. Rather, it is bodily states that generate jouissance that is reproved, either because it disturbs the organization of the psyche or because the object involved rejects them, thereby condemning them to disappear from consciousness. These states of pleasure are due to the excitation of the so-called erogenous zones, which are highly excitable and produce pleasant sensations linked with the object of the earliest attachments, the mother, via parts of her body, that is, part-objects. In other words, there is a meeting of two eroticisms. First, her own erotogenic zones are linked up with those of the infant: the breast is placed against the mouth; then the anus is caressed by the mother while she administers bodily care, and finally the sexual organ is also aroused when the infant is being cleaned. Freud made a decisive leap here by discovering direct, immediate bodily erogeneity of an intensity that ruptures the tissue of sensible experience—a source of desires and fantasies. Furthermore, erogenous experience has its source in territories that are zones of communication between the inside of the body and the external world, where the objects which bring satisfaction are to be found (Brusset, 1992).⁵

An echo may be found here of the dual dimension of dreams, albeit organized differently: the progression of the development of the libido is accompanied by the rejection of its most intense, but also its most prohibited, manifestations, into the forgotten recesses of the unconscious. They do not remain inert there. They will be animated by an upward thrust—a sign of their vitality that has not been weakened by the passage of time. When they resurface partially—if the opportunity presents itself—they will do so in disguises that will make it impossible to recognize their origins, that is, their bodily sources bearing the marks of time. It is for the psychoanalyst’s ear to retrace their invisible path. All things considered, dreams appear, then, to be recurrent digressions, occurring on a daily basis, since we dream every night. Each night we withdraw from diurnal temporality without being completely cut off from it, since the embryo from which dreams are formed is indeed an unconscious fantasy from the day before. The latter had already broken with the temporal flow of experience, ordered successively. It constituted itself “outside-time” (Kristeva, 1996). The space of the present instant obscures the moment in which a more or less clandestine reverie is secretly taking shape. And, similarly, once a dream has been recounted and examined piece by piece in order to subject each piece to the work of association, it will give rise to an interpretation which depends on this rupture of the time of ordinary experience. Once it has been interpreted, it dissolves into diurnal time, ceasing to solicit the dreamer’s psyche once it has been deprived of its exciting, evocative power through analysis.

It is true that speaking of infantile sexuality was revolutionary in itself. Certainly, basing the idea of a subject’s development on stages defined by the pleasure procured by his erogenous zones, the mouth, anus, penis, clitoris, was more than audacious; but, with respect to the temporal model, it has to be admitted that there was nothing in it to shake our conception of time, apart from the cuts of repression. Unless, that is, one turns towards the idea of layers of lava overlapping each other, causing emanations of successive temporal currents to cohabit. But here, too, the successive order is preserved. One could nuance this judgement but, essentially, time remained what it had always been. Libidinal experience conforms to a schema of development conceived of in an almost Haeckelian, cephalo–caudal manner. The migration of erogenous zones follows, as it were, the developmental line of organo–psychic growth, albeit modified by the effects of repression that blur the clarity of the temporal programme. Moreover, sexual diphasism, the effect of the combination of maturation and repression, grounds sexuality in two stages, separated by a period of latency which resists complete and full awareness—in a continuous mode—of the stages of sexuality, and breaks the continuity of memory. Latency ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE The construction of heterochrony
• CHAPTER TWO Distortions of time in the transference: some clinical and theoretical implications
• CHAPTER THREE "Making time: killing time"
• CHAPTER FOUR Existence in time: development or catastrophe?
• CHAPTER FIVE Regression, curiosity, and the discovery of the object
• CHAPTER SIX The Aztecs, Masada, and the compulsion to repeat
• CHAPTER SEVEN Borges, immortality, and "The Circular Ruins"
• INDEX