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At the beginning stages in the history of psychoanalysis, when Freud held his theory of seduction, he was committed to a realist conception of memory,
in which there were memories situated in a verifiable frame with datable temporal references. When Freud shifted his theoretical emphasis to the primacy of fantasy, Rouart argues, the concept of mnemic traces became important. Memories were no longer constituted as memories. For any fantasy to appear in the field of consciousness as a memory, some sort of psychic process or elaboration was required. Rouart would distinguish between the faculty of memory as an unconscious preservation whose limits we do not know, and memories that we are able to report. Even if the analytic investigation of memories aims to establish them eventually in a linear chronological succession, they do not present with such a continuity despite the fact that they are datable. Memories are evoked by circumstances which consciously or preconsciously bring them to the fore. Thus, memories can hardly be the end point of an attempt to elucidate the repressed; rather they are a stage toward this goal. Memories must be viewed, then, as having a compromise function, just as symptoms and dreams do. Memories have a manifest face and a hidden face. Memory is, from Rouart's point of view, an organized amnesia. Rouart reviews Freud's comments on screen memories, essentially extending this concept to all memories. He then considers the problem of the formation of the memory of the self, the capacity to have memories of oneself as it becomes established in early childhood. This problem of the recall of the self experiences, as well as the establishment of temporal coordinates, leads to the difficult problem of the relationship between the unconscious and preconscious and time.