Chapter 12 Where the Lights and Shadows Fall: On Not Being Able to Remember and Not Being Able to Forget1

Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego.

It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things

appalled me.

As the child’s mind was growing into knowledge, his mind was

growing into memory:

as her life unfolded, his soul, long stupefied

in a cold narrow prison, was unfolding too,

and trembling gradually into full consciousness.

‘As the child’s mind was growing into knowledge, his mind was growing into memory’ — in this amazing phrase George Eliot describes Silas Marner’s emergence from a state of severe melancholic withdrawal into full lively consciousness. The connection between the availability of significant emotional memories to conscious thought and the sense of the very existence of the self and its relation to others is central to her conception of the mind when creating her character. The direct parallel with the development of the child’s mind implies that this transformation from what she calls an ‘insect-like’ state into

full humanity, this ‘trembling gradually into consciousness’ is a psychological rebirth: a new ‘stepping into the light’ in Damasio’s (1999) inspiring phrase.

In this chapter, I would like to examine, from a psychoanalytical point of view, the question of this particular kind of lack of ‘illumination’ in the conscious mind — a regression to a memory-less state of almost complete darkness, of being psychically reduced to the narrow beam of a candlelight. I will also examine the question of the emotional inability to forget, as to my mind these apparently opposite psychological problems in fact belong to the same area of the psychopathology of memory. I am thinking about the problem of an excessive ‘illumination’ of particular events in the mind which compulsively steal the limelight, which can be the consequence of trauma, that is to say, of the ego being overwhelmed by an experience it cannot deal with. Traumatic experience may return unmodified to the conscio