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.
The very first time I read Breuer and Freud's laconic conclusion from Studies on Hysteria, my curiosity was aroused. What did they mean by writing that hysterics suffer from reminiscences, an expression, which immediately may give associations to Darwin's theory of hereditary expressions of affect? Only much later, retrospectively, did I understand the richness of ideas in Breuer and Freud's conclusion. The hysterics suffer from memories. In what follows, I shall use the term reminiscences for unconscious memory and reserve the term recollection for conscious memory function (see also Loewald, 1955). How reminiscences become traumatic was a question occupying Freud through his entire career as an author. In Project for a Scientific Psychology, it is declared, “a psychological theory deserving any consideration must furnish an explanation of ‘memory’” (Freud, 1895a, p. 299) and in the article Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through, Freud notes that even though his technique has been modified, the goal is the same: “descriptively speaking it is to fill in gaps in memory; dynamically speaking, it is to overcome resistance due to repression” (Freud, 1914, p. 148).
The 13th Nordic Psychoanalytic Congress, 1992, focused on the same subject. Is recollection a reliable evidence of the infantile past and how are we to understand the traumatic effect connected to memorising?
In my case, a female patient gave me the reason to reflect on the psychology of memory and it was in this connection that a new significance was added to Breuer and Freud's conclusion of the hysterics’ reminiscences. In other words, my understanding of the hysterics’ reminiscences came nachträglich, to suggest a term which has served as a guide for my reflections on the psychology of memory, which I shall present.