This article starts from the idea that since its inception psychoanalysis seems obsessed with memory and is seduced by the past again and again. Or can we perceive an evolution in psychoanalysis in this respect? After all, from Breuer's and Freud's finding that hysterical symptoms disappear by evoking the memory of the causing event to Bion's assertion that psychoanalysis has nothing to do with the past, a true tension arc unfolds over time about the status of memory and life history. I examine throughout the history of psychoanalysis what importance analysts attach to the past of the patient and how they deal with it concretely, in particular regarding the transference. I distinguish four consecutive positions. While for Freud - in the intended conversion from repeating to remembering - ‘historization’ of wat happens in the analytic session is central, for Ferenczi and Klein attention shifts more to the therapeutic value of the ‘actualization’ in itself of the past. In Bion's ‘dehistorization’ we see a paradigm change: psychoanalysis is not about the past, what counts is the here-and-now experience in the session which should not be linked to the past. After Bion, the idea is gaining ground that not particularly the past determines the present but, the other way around, the present experience shapes the past. The relationship between repeating and remembering is going to spin and make us dizzy. The new, original experiences in analysis are not history, they máke history. In this ‘posteriority’ I distinguish two forms: psychodynamic and contingent posteriority. I argue that - despite in general memory shifts from the center to the periphery - the four discussed positions continue to coexist. Analogous to individual life histories, also in psychoanalysis new viewpoints bring old ones - nachträglich - to life.