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The term "[[memory]]" ([[Fr]]. ''[[mémoire]]'') is used in two different ways in [[Lacan]]'s [[Works of Jacques Lacan|work]].
It is related to the concepts of [[remembering]] and [[recollection]], and opposed to [[imaginary]] reminiscence.
[[Lacan]] makes it clear that his concept of [[memory]] is not a [[biological]] or [[psychology|psychological]] one.
For [[psychoanalysis]], [[memory]] is the [[symbolic]] [[history]] of the [[subject]], a [[chain]] of [[signifier]]s linked up together, a "signifying articulation."<ref>{{S7}} p.223</ref>
Something is memorable and memorized only 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.<ref>{{S7}} p.224</ref>
==Biological or Physiological Concept==
In the 1960s [[Lacan]] reserves the term "memory" for the [[biological]] or [[physiological]] concept of [[memory]] as an organic property.<ref>{{Ec}} p.42</ref>
It thus no longer designates the [[symbolic]] [[history]] of the [[subject]] which is the concern of [[psychoanalysis]], but something which lies outside [[psychoanalysis]] altogether.
==References==
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