Fantasy and Memory: The Aetiological Role of Thoughts According to Freud

'Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.' This early formulation, though it underwent drastic revision as Freud's psychoanalytic thought developed, contains two elements which remained central. It places one source of psychological disorder in thoughts, and it treats the hysteric as somehow the victim of his or her past. The hysteric is unfree, a prisoner of his individual history. The maxim brings the past into play through thoughts, specifically thoughts about the past, i.e. memories. That our past can influence our present behaviour in devious ways is an important insight, that one of those ways is through thoughts proves an even more important insight. A cluster of questions arises around these points. Is it actually our past, or (better) our actual past, that influences our behaviour in the areas Freud discusses? How is one to distinguish the causal efficacy of reality and fantasy? Is their efficacy 'causal'? How and why is 'memory' brought in as intermediary? How is one to distinguish memory of reality, memory of fantasy, and fantasy of memory? And do any of these distinctions matter to the individual's unfreedom and the possibilities of overcoming it? In this paper I will be taking only some first steps towards answering these questions.

What were the grounds at the beginning of psychoanalysis for believing that there could be an 'analytical' therapy? Why should 'analysis', 'understanding', 'interpretation', 'insight' be of value in treatment? Part of the answer is to be found in the belief that certain disorders are psychological in origin. If thoughts lay behind problems, then unravelling thoughts might help solve those problems. The connexions here are in fact very complex, and the character of the thoughts involved is so far left open, but we can start with this question: Why should thoughts be assigned a role in the production of certain disorders; in particular, why should hysteria be regarded