You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Barbier's study provides a condensed exposition of Freud's views on memory and the capacity for memory. Barbier discerns three periods in Freud's treatment of memory. In the first, from 1895 to 1897, we find a theory of inscriptions or mnemic traces as worked out in the Project. These mnemic traces have both external and internal origins. In the second period, 1898 to 1915, there were modifications due to the abandonment of the seduction theory. Barbier traces
these modifications in the theory of memory as developed in The Interpretation of Dreams. Repression was emphasized as the means of forgetting. The third period occurred after 1915, that is, after the papers, "The Unconscious" and "Repression." In this period are included the study of negation, as well as such mechanisms as repudiation (Verwerfung or foreclosure) and disavowal (Verleugnung). Barbier discusses other methods of forgetting, such as splitting, depersonalization, and obsessional undoing. Restitutive memory was also studied in this third period. Barbier notes that a historical exposition necessarily leaves out of account many important fundamental oppositions, such as internal and external reality, affect and representation, bound and unbound, as well as present and past, as they are dealt with in Freud's thinking about memory.