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The term remembering designates the specific [[psychic ]] [[action ]] of producing a [[memory ]] and is to be distinguished from reminiscences, flashbacks, and all [[other ]] elements of the [[past ]] that might be seen to constitute other types of [[representation]]. [[Freud]], together with Josef [[Breuer]], introduced this [[notion ]] in their preliminary [[communication ]] (1893a) as part of their cathartic [[therapy ]] and Freud's initially [[trauma]]-based [[theory ]] of [[hysteria]]. Freud stressed that simple [[recollection ]] of [[memories ]] with no accompanying [[affect]], and so reduced to pure [[ideas]], would have no therapeutic [[value]]. Remembering that is efficacious, and therefore of interest to [[psychoanalysis]], involves the [[subject]]'s reliving [[traumatic ]] events with all their original [[affective ]] intensity. Here Freud, while also stressing [[conditions ]] of therapy, was already distinguishing purely [[narrative ]] ideas that have affective [[energy ]] [[discharged ]] and that remain blocked in a [[split]]-off part of [[consciousness]].

The recollection of memories in [[treatment ]] introduced the difficulty of distinguishing between [[childhood ]] memories and "[[screen ]] memories" (1899a), despite certain [[clinical ]] characteristics pertaining to the latter. Freud noted that the disparity between screen memories and other memories from childhood remained ultimately problematic. Did [[conscious ]] screen memories originate in childhood or simply relate to it?

This question, raised as early as 1899, remains very much alive, because there is no [[guarantee ]] that the recollection of even the most authentic memories travel a direct route from the past of childhood to the [[present ]] of [[analytic ]] treatment, and the [[total ]] reliability of such remembering is certainly open to [[doubt]]. Inevitably, childhood memories are subject to the happenstance [[experience ]] of the subject, leading to [[unconscious ]] distortions, infidelities, maskings, [[false ]] leads, and so on. The [[analyst ]] who maintains that such memories are genuine, even those with the best [[claim ]] to [[being ]] authentic, is either naive or is laboring under a [[narcissistic ]] [[illusion ]] of omniscience.

In the area of remembering, psychoanalysis has to [[defend ]] its sphere of [[authority ]] by distinguishing itself from neurobiological, neuropsychological, and cognitive approaches to memory. Remembering remains a key element of [[psychoanalytic ]] treatment. As in other relations that psychoanalysis has with proximate [[scientific ]] disciplines, the issue is generally one of a cross-disciplinary misunderstanding, which it would be proper to resolve. This is what motivated [[Jean Laplanche ]] to evoke [[Freudian ]] pseudo-[[biology]], pseudo-[[neurology]], and pseudo-[[psychology]]. Unconscious phenomena, the area specific to psychoanalysis, inevitably [[pervert]], or at least distort, the various types of positive [[knowledge ]] [[about ]] [[humans]].

Remembering in psychoanalysis can only be pertinent, therefore, when such remembering imitates the mechanisms that govern the [[recall ]] function of memory, whose incredible complexity contemporary [[science ]] is just beginning to plumb. Conversely, because of the necessary [[positivism ]] of its [[project]], the scientific approach to remembering cannot account for the negativism and emptiness in the [[psyche]]'s [[dialectic ]] between [[meaning ]] and meaninglessness. Everything—from [[birth ]] to death—that constitutes the enigmatic and [[singular ]] [[design ]] of an [[individual]]'s destiny escapes, for the most part, from the individual's consciousness. Hence, there are limits to remembering.

To see how remembering functions in [[analysis]], it is appropriate to chart a [[history ]] of the aims of [[analytic treatment]]:

* The original memory [[model ]] of psychoanalysis aimed at recollecting a childhood past that was buried but is likely to be brought to light.* A subsequent model yielded increasingly to [[structures ]] not subject to the [[internal ]] history of the subject's [[life ]] (the [[death ]] [[drive]], the [[Oedipus ]] [[complex]], [[repetition]]), in other [[words]], to elements introduced by Freud in his second conceptualization of the psychic [[apparatus ]] and to advances made in psychoanalysis since around 1930. Because psychoanalysis depends on the [[chance ]] elements of the [[transference]], this substantially relativized hope for a "spontaneous tendency towards a [[return ]] of the [[repressed]]." As a result, the unrepresentable, the repetition [[compulsion]], and various forms of psychic breaching have taken on a prominent [[role ]] in the transference (Baranès).* Finally, since the 1970s, psychoanalysis has been extending and openly accepting its own [[theoretical ]] and [[practical ]] divisions.

Remembering should be regarded essentially as reconstructing a certain historical [[truth ]] together with ceding to what is sometimes referred to as "[[structural ]] truth" (truth concerned with [[mental ]] organization). Remembering and the [[freedom ]] to rediscover one's own history, along with the de-centering that this entails, carves out a [[space ]] that accords with some modulations of [[fantasy ]] play and with the necessary mythology of origin. Analytic treatment—woven from the memorable, the [[infantile]], the repeatable, while encountering limitations to meaning and meaninglessness and the [[absence ]] of [[temporal ]] references—would be lost if the analyst's constructions and [[interpretations ]] of the transference were not subordinate to the [[analysand ]] and his freedom.

An individual engages in analytic treatment to effect [[change]]. An assemblage of memories, even an organized one, that does not benefit from the [[work ]] of composition and that does not take into account the inherent constraints of the psychic apparatuses, whether grouped or corporeal, would be [[nothing ]] but a [[dead ]] [[letter]], destined to be neither [[interpreted ]] nor recreated. It is the fabric of the transference that facilitates, for both analysand and analyst, the energetics of transformation. As a result, while memories and historical [[working ]] through might not be enough in themselves to move the analysis forward, they are nevertheless a sine qua non of analysis. In this respect, individuals are like nations: a [[community ]] that has forgotten its history is condemned to servitude.

[[Abstinence]]/rule of abstinence; [[Acting out]]/acting in; [[Active ]] [[technique]]; Amnesia; Change; [[Construction]]/reconstruction; Déjà-vu; [[Development ]] of [[Psycho]]-Analysis; Ego states; [[Forgetting]]; Memory; [[Narcissistic elation]]; Relaxation [[principle ]] and neo-[[catharsis]]; "Remembering, [[Repeating ]] and [[Working-Through]]"; Reminiscences; [[Repression]], lifting of; [[Resistance]]; [[Silence]]; Transference; [[Word]]-presentation.[[Bibliography]]

* [[Freud, Sigmund]]. (1899a). Screen memories. SE, 3: 299-322.* Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1893a). On the [[psychical ]] [[mechanism ]] of [[hysterical ]] phenomina: Preliminary communication. SE, 2: 1-17.