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The author directs her thought to a subject that has been somewhat neglected in the psychoanalytic literature in recent decades: remembrance and memory. Working from a concept of remembrance that is consistently regarded as constructivist and intersubjective rather than historical, i.e. event based and concretistic, Quindeau seeks to establish its central function and significance both for the constitution of psychic material and for the human psychic structure. Drawing together sociological, psychoanalytic and humanities-based approaches, Quindeau attains deeper insights into individual and social remembrance processes. These ultimately lead to a theory of the constitution and socialization of remembrance that is based partly on a reconstruction of Freud's theory of remembrance and partly on the re-establishment of the seduction theory in a form modified by the author.
The author pursues three main lines of enquiry into the psychoanalytic theory of remembrance and memory.
The first trail leads the reader into a deep study of Freud's early writings, which contain isolated references to his theoretical and clinical views on remembering and forgetting. In his seduction theory, these are amplified into the most significant topos of the psychoanalytic model of remembrance. This demonstrates how far Freud's concept of remembrance had already moved between 1893 and 1897 from the prevailing contemporaneous image and theories of the memory as a storehouse: aetiological significance attaches not to the historical event as such but to its subsequent psychic working over in remembrance! On this basic premise, Freud constructed not only his model of the dual phase origination of trauma but also the extremely complex concept of ‘deferred action’ (Nachträglichkeit).
On the basis of the latter, the scientist pursues a second main trail of the psychoanalytic theory of remembrance, in which memories are conceived as permanent transcriptions of past experiences. The spatial metaphor of