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What stood out for me while I was reading this clinical material is something that could perhaps be described as an erasure of the historical dimension. Of course, the young man we read about is able to ‘quickly recount his background’ to the analyst, and yet what is striking is that there are no significant events in what he can put into words about his life, no memorable encounters that marked him or affected him in such a way as to make it possible for him to single them out and to recognise himself in them. In a way, the patient in this material does not remember, in the psychoanalytic sense where remembering involves an active process of subjectivation of individual history (Lacan, 2006).
Some historical traces are, it is true, dotted here and there. By the end, for example, it becomes clear that an Oedipal drama must have dealt a blow to the patient at some point. We know that as a child there must have been a moment when he experienced something unbearable in connection to his mother's absence and that at some other time in his childhood he felt scared at the idea of his parents' death. We also know that ‘6 months’ before he started his analysis he stopped going to work and that ‘over 1 year’ before the analysis he stopped having sex with his girlfriend. Crucially, however, we don't know anything about what happened at any of these significant turning points of his life because the patient does not talk about them and does not question his implication in these life-changing moments.
In spite of the patient's pathetic struggle to recall even the content of sessions, overall the material seems to indicate that this erasure of history reflects perhaps not so much an inability to remember as much as a hesitation. The patient is suspended, he hesitates, we could say, in front of the risk of remembering, which is also the risk of stepping into time and of living one's life. In her extraordinary psychoanalytic study of risk, Anne Dufourmantelle (2019) has highlighted