Prologue

In his first book with Freud and Breuer (1955) famously wrote, “Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.” Though Freud conceived of memory in non-linear terms, where past and the present mutually influenced one another, psychoanalysis has tended to conceive of therapeutic remembering as recollection. Memory is thus something that can be recovered or unearthed, to use Freud’s archeological metaphor. In his later work, Freud (and most of his contemporary successors) focused on the relationship between the analyst and the analysand in the so-called here-and-now, where the patient’s past could be observed in vivo through the transference or through enactments. A patient’s ruminations about the past were often deemed “extra-transferential.” As an older Freud (1912) himself put it:

It cannot be disputed that controlling the phenomena of transference presents the psychoanalyst with the greatest difficulties. But it should not be forgotten that it is precisely they that do us the inestimable service of making the patient’s hidden and forgotten erotic impulses immediate and manifest. For when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigie.

And yet patients continue to come into our offices wanting to work out happenings in their recent and distant past. They are also increasingly struggling to make sense of what has come to be called “the social,” meaning the ways history and collective memory affect how we see the world, in particular around the legacy of slavery and colonialism.

This issue is an attempt to grapple with the way remembering plays out in a contemporary psychoanalysis. Most of the authors in this issue look at remembering neither in the original Freudian way – as recollection – nor in the later Freudian way – as a transference happening that can be observed on a plinth through a well-timed interpretation. Rather, remembering is understood in its gerundive form as a mostly relational activity, as something we do together, wh