Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911) (XIII)

In the last entry, we considered some of the interlocking ideas contained in the following passage:

“A special function was instituted which had periodically to search the external world, in order that its data might be familiar already if an urgent internal need should arise — the function of attention [Aufmerksamkeit]. Its activity meets the sense-impressions half way, instead of awaiting their appearance. At the same time, probably, a system of notation [Merken] was introduced, whose task it was to lay down the results of this periodical activity of consciousness — a part of what we call memory [Gedächtnis]” (220-221)

I want to emphasize something else about this passage, though, which may turn out to hold special significance. It matters, I think, that the faculty of Merken (notation, retention) — “whose task it was to lay down the results” of attention — is not synonymous with memory überhaupt, but is rather only “a part of what we call memory [Gedächtnis].”

What might have prevented Freud from helping himself to the more sweeping thesis that Gedächtnis generally — and not only that “part” of it designated Merken — originates at this stage? Why doesn’t he claim that, before the psyche is impelled to “retain” the results of its “attending” activities, it has no need for memory, hence no facility for it, at all?

I suspect that such a strong thesis would have left Freud with a contradiction. In fact, it seems to me that his descriptions of the psyche while under the reign of the pleasure principle, and in particular its strategy of hallucinatory satisfaction — these descriptions already presuppose some kind of primitive or incipient “memory” on the part of that psyche. To recall the paradigmatic example: an infant who feels the need for nourishment when the breast — hence real satisfaction — is unavailable, will initially hallucinate that breast in its stead. Yet from out of which “materials” is an infant able to hallucinate this satisfaction, if not from the memories of previous experiences of satisfaction, that is, from memories of  real nourishment?

Now perhaps Melanie Klein, or a theorist influenced by her, could appeal to a stock of biologically innate or “endogenous” conceptions — including breast imagos — from which the infant draws in its phantasies. Such imagos may be concretized through particular experiences of nourishment, but do not essentially depend for their existence upon such experiences. From this Kleinian standpoint, it seems, the infant is entirely capable of “attempts at satisfaction by means of hallucination” without the resources afforded by memory. (See the chapter on Klein in Mitchell and Greenberg’s Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory for a discussion of this issue.)

But as far as I can tell, this standpoint is rather foreign to Freud’s way of thinking. For this reason alone, I imagine that Freud would credit the pleasure-ego with a primitive form of Gedächtnis, even before it evolves the more refined faculty of Merken — a term that may designate a recollective process that is explicitly “conscious” and, after a fashion, “realistic” and “rational.”

In short, we may conclude that there is such a thing as memory at the level of the pleasure principle, as yet unharnessed to the reality principle. And this means something like: a “memory" whose productions the psyche does not yet reliably distinguish from either its own “wishes” or its contemporaneous “reality.”

And this reading must be correct, at least in a rough way. A few years after publishing this piece, Freud formalizes his view, in “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through” (1914), that the “repetition compulsion” of neurosis is precisely a mode of memory, namely, the form memory takes when the path of conscious recollection is obstructed by resistance and the repressions it holds in place. This suffices in itself to demonstrate that “memory” is not absent at the “archaic” level of the unconscious, primary process, and the pleasure principle.

This is a peculiar form of memory, though, remote from the “retention” that evolves in Freud’s account here. It has the paradoxical flavor of memory with no awareness of being memory. (This is one context in which to grasp Freud’s famous claim that the unconscious is “timeless.”) So far as the pleasure-ego is aware, its hallucination of the object — the breast, say — is not a “memory” at all, but that object’s reality. It systematically misapprehends its “past” as “present.” Or conversely, like the adult neurotic: its “present” is systematically overlaid by the “past,” with which it is conflated. The pleasure-ego does not lack memory, then, so much as it lacks the capacity to identify a given mental representation as memory, or to distinguish it from any other “real” (i.e. reality-apt) representation.

To summarize: our picture is not of a psyche without memory, per se, but of one that continuously constructs its experience, unawares, with memory-materials.