Changes

{{Top}}mémoire{{Bottom}}

The term "[[memory]]" is used in two different ways in [[Lacan]]'s [[Works of Jacques Lacan|work]].

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

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.

<blockquote>"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."<ref>{{S3}} p.152</ref></blockquote>

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>

In this sense, the [[unconscious]] is a sort of [[memory]],<ref>{{S3}} p. 155</ref> since "what we teach the subject to recognize as his unconscious is his history."<ref>{{E}} p. 52</ref>

The phenomena associated with [[memory]] which most interest the [[analyst]] are those moments when something goes wrong with [[memory]], when the [[subject]] cannot [[recollection|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>

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.

{{See}}

* [[Biology]]

{{Also}}

<references/>