Memory

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French: mémoire

Jacques Lacan

The term "memory" is used in two different ways in Lacan's work.

Symbolic Order

In the 1950s, memory is understood as a phenomenon of the symbolic order, related to the signifying chain.

Recollection

It is related to the concepts of remembering and recollection, and opposed to imaginary reminiscence.

Biology and Psychology

Lacan makes it clear that his concept of memory is not a biological or psychological one.

"The memory which interests psychoanalysis is quite distinct from what psychologists speak of when they display its mechanism to us in an animate being in an experiment."[1]

Symbolic History of the Subject

For psychoanalysis, memory is the symbolic history of the subject, a chain of signifiers linked up together, a "signifying articulation."[2]

Something is memorable and memorized only when it is "registered in the signifying chain."[3]

In this sense, the unconscious is a sort of memory,[4] since "what we teach the subject to recognize as his unconscious is his history."[5]

Psychoanalysis

The phenomena associated with memory which most interest the analyst are those moments when something goes wrong with memory, when the subject cannot recall a part of his history.

It is the fact that he can forget, that a signifier can be elided from the signifying chain, that makes the psychoanalytic subject distinctive.[6]

Biology and Psychology

In the 1960s Lacan reserves the term "memory" for the biological or physiological concept of memory as an organic property.[7]

It thus no longer designates the symbolic history of the subject which is the concern of psychoanalysis, but something which lies outside psychoanalysis altogether.

See Also

References

  1. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 1955-56. Trans. Russell Grigg. London: Routledge, 1993. p.152
  2. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. p.223
  3. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. p. 212
  4. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 1955-56. Trans. Russell Grigg. London: Routledge, 1993. p. 155
  5. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p. 52
  6. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. p.224
  7. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. p. 42