Chapter 8 ‘Only Inside-Also Outside’1

It might be said that in the last analysis the ‘spirit’ of persons or things comes down to their capacity to be remembered and imagined after perception of them has ceased.

Like primitive man who accepts the ineluctability of death, acknowledging it and disavowing it in the same magical act, memory acknowledges and disavows the reality of loss. And, even when the world is no longer populated with spirits, in their place memories animate the shadow left by the lost objects. We would say, then, that remembering is the equivalent of a magic technique.

Similar to Perseus’ mirror in front of the Gorgon, memory reflects each new and thus disturbing encounter on to the reassuring polished surface of the déjà vu, sacrificing the unknown to what is ‘already known’. It oscillates between the two statements, ‘Yes, it's true; I can remember it’ and, ‘No, I have never seen it, so it's not true.’ As a solid shield of reality testing, the work of memory tends to govern us more than we care to admit, at the risk of distorting our analytic practice.

The discovery of the second topography, discerning at the heart of the unconscious an id that was no longer comprised of the repressed properly speaking, a source of infantile amnesia, at once relativised and complicated the role of memory, to the extent that the last study Freud devoted to it (‘Constructions in analysis’) (Freud, 1937a), 2 ended by introducing radically new perspectives. Freud admitted that owing to his preoccupations with the patient's recollections ‘the other portion of the work, the task performed by the analyst,

had been pushed into the background’ (p. 258). And not contenting himself either with the already familiar notion of counter-transference or with limiting himself to the notion of construction, Freud drew us into a new and vast field of investigation by inviting us to reflect on ‘the link between the two portions of the work of analysis, between his own part [the analyst'