From the description given by Freud of the beginnings of the construction of the self and its development towards maturity, the article returns to the work of memory and a conception of time that calls for a new mobility, both in psychoanalysis and in other disciplines today. Freud’s archaeological metaphors are re-read here by Paul-Laurent Assoun and then by the archaeologist Laurent Olivier. The latter renews the comparison between the archaeological object and the psychic object by proposing a conception of a moving memory of the past to which we can only give meaning through and in the present. Hence its link with the work of memory in a transference situation. But today’s archaeology opens out on to a new conception of time and the past-present-future relationship by examining its relations with psychoanalysis.