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Edited by the distinguished psychoanalysts Udo Hock and Dominique Scarfone, On Freud's “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” marks a significant addition to the International Psychoanalytical Association book series, Contemporary Freud: Turning Points and Critical Issues. This acclaimed series, founded in 1991 by Robert Wallerstein, consistently engages critically with pivotal Freudian concepts. As series editor Gabriela Legorreta highlights in her foreword, “The study of Freud's theory has expanded and taken new directions, and this has led to a theoretical, technical, and clinical pluralism that must be worked through” (p. ix), setting the stage for the book's insightful exploration of this foundational Freudian text within today's diverse psychoanalytic landscape. Scarfone and Hock have curated a collection of 11 papers written by various psychoanalysts from different regions of the International Psychoanalytical Association. The editors explain that the chapters are loosely organized into three categories of focus: linguistic and terminological, conceptual, and clinical, with significant overlap.
In their opening chapter, Hock and Scarfone point out that this text is not only part of the technique papers of 1911 to 1915; it also belongs to a long series of Freud's papers having to do with “distorted forms of remembering” (p. 4). In “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” Freud (1914/1958) examines how repetition is, in fact, a “special form of memory disorder” (p. 4). The essays in this volume draw the reader's attention to the ways in which our understanding of Freud has been distorted or misremembered, and how an examination of these distortions helps us understand the text more deeply.