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“I did that,” says my memory. “I did not,” says my pride; and memory yields.
Psychoanalysis has neither a coherent theory of consciousness and memory, nor a nonparadoxical explanation of self-deception. By means of a clinical case, I explore the function of self-deception as a disavowal of consciousness and memory rather than a contradictory state of knowledge.
The presenting complaint of a patient, I shall call “Sydney,” involved “strange beds.” From time to time he awoke in the bedrooms of women he didn't recall having met. Wrongful behavior, he sensed, must have led him to his newly found, temporary companions; but Sydney didn't remember and was afraid to inquire about the previous night. Psychoanalysis, he hoped, would help him discover what he had been up to that caused his amnesia.
Sydney was a highly educated, well-spoken forensic pathologist in his early forties. For the most part his analytic sessions were spent berating himself for his career's lack of distinction. I had considerable trouble getting him past feeling sorry for himself. It seemed as if the only insight he had gained in the first few months of treatment was the realization that the compelling motive that directed him toward medical pathology was his sense of helplessness in regard to his own mortality, and how this unrecognized apprehension related both to his serious case of scarlet fever as a child and to his parents' continual accusation that he was selfish.
His parents—European born (he, a school teacher; she, a nurse) criticized his preoccupation with his own needs; they were particularly outraged at catching