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In one of his most detailed constructions of the workings of an “unconscious,” published in 1915, Freud asserts that repression “does not cover everything that is unconscious.” Instead, the unconscious “has a wider compass: the repressed is a part of the unconscious” (p. 166). Aktar (2013), commenting on this passage, argues that this “wider compass” includes, for Freud, “primal” phenomena, whose origins precede individual subjectivity and experience, existing a priori as the “phylogenetically transmitted memories of corresponding events in man's (sic) prehistory” (p. 2). But what of an individual's very particular experiences of early life? By what process other than repression are these memories made inaccessible? According to Freud, something he called “infantile amnesia”—one of the nodal points of this paper—shrouds nearly all of our earliest recollections. This suggests another process operating psychically, a different form of forgetting in which much of the “forgotten” is lost to analytic discourse. It is significant that the relationship between the unconscious and repression is spatially construed in Freud's reckoning: his use of the term “compass” (Umfang) is deployed here less as a material object of direction than as an “encompassing” or circumscribing entity. To discover what, beyond repression, might be at work within the unconscious requires examining the latter's defining characteristic: what Freud would call amnesie.
Freud proposed several versions of amnesia in the 1880s and 1890s that not only characterized but also encompassed the Freudian unconscious itself. Its edges were not determined by what was conscious or “preconscious” but rather by what Freud chose to discount; it will be termed here as the “forgettable”