Amnesias of a Freudian Kind

This essay is the second of a two-part series that examines Freud's constructions of amnesia as they participated in “forgetting,” both within the mechanisms of his psychoanalytic project and, far less investigated, as a way to fix the borders of his idea of an unconscious. As argued in Part One (O'Donoghue, 2021), the operations of forgetting that Freud would identify with repression were in fact constituted by a preceding removal from memory, one that was discursive rather than psychical. Significant events were banished from view—or, better, hidden in plain sight—by being enunciated as valueless, or as Freud said of his early years in Vienna, “nothing was worth remembering” (Freud, 1899, p. 312). What remained were selected fragments of one's past that were interpretable as markers of repression, and as such tied to specific a priori drives whose sexual or aggressive impulses necessitated their inaccessibility to consciousness. This allowed for a schema to be placed on the vagaries of an individual life and desires, and those that were irreducible to such characterizations, originating with Freud's own early life, were rendered forgettable.

Freud's specific uses of the term “amnesie” have received surprisingly little attention, a fact that can be attributable to its lack of psychoanalytic gravitas—in contrast to repression—and as such it functioned as a descriptor that could be applied more fluidly. Several of its streams, including Freud's earliest published discussion of amnesia, as well as its later “infantile” version, were charted in the first portion of this study. We turn now to its presence within Studies on Hysteria (1895) (where we find a striking example of expungement as Freud attempted to treat a patient by making her “reminiscences” permanently