American Imago

Abstract:

This paper addresses the problem of memory in psychoanalysis. To begin with, I identify two contrasting models of the remembered past in Freud, a type of recollective memory that consists of repressed but retrievable mnemic experience, and an active conception of memory, what I call re-descriptive memory, comprising an imaginative sense of the past. I develop the hypothesis of re-descriptive memory through a discussion of the scriptural analogy of memory and the uncanny mnemic-trace. In the final part of the paper I elaborate further on the act of remembering by linking the sense of the past to a sense of conviction.