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Just as the first dream represented her turning away from the man she loved to her father - that is to say, her flight from life into disease - so the second dream announced that she was about to tear herself free from her father and had been reclaimed once more by the realities of life. (Freud , p. 122)
The quotation that forms the first part of my title is taken from the closing words of Freud's ‘Dora’, poignant and aggressive on Freud's part as they have always struck me as being. I also find them deeply evocative, at the level of psychic life. How much does life claim us; how much are we claimed by our past, by memories of our past? My paper is organised around the paradoxical role that memory can play: it can make free - like life, be an agent for reclamation - while in its inaccessibility it can haunt. We seek ways of theorising both the remembered and the unremembered, and ways of thinking about what it is that memories are memories of. Here one possibility might be that memories that are able to be held within the psyche are of a different order of experience from those that are projected out, expelled. It is this theme - the location of memory - that I explore here, considering differences between ‘classical’ hysteria (in Freud's work) and ‘hysteria today’, the theme of this conference. I want to pose a group of questions: what happens to the memories - to use Freud's terms, the reminiscences - from which the hysteric suffers? Classically they are abreacted in speech. But if they are not abreacted, might they become located in another: a person, or, perhaps, a place that represents psychic space? Because we cannot separate our thinking from a more recent psychoanalytic and therapeutic language, it is clear that I'm hinting at wider questions - broadly, under the heading of splitting and projection - and at a larger number of disorders than the hysterias. But my focus today remains the hysterical as denoting questions about the body and its registration of th