Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914) (II)
After Freud’s introductory overview of the three “phases” in the development of analytic technique — each of which, of course, implies some attitude to the superordinate aim of “remembering” — Freud “interpolate[s] a few remarks” (148), extending over several pages, on the meanings of “forgetting” and “remembering” in different contexts. The possible objects of “forgetfulness,” in particular, run a spectrum:
Experiences that, while they haven’t been “thought about” for some time, have nevertheless been “always known” (148) in some way
“Things” the patient “has never thought of since they happened” (148)
Events that are properly shrouded by “childhood amnesia,” that is, are repressed, but which are simultaneously “preserved” in distorted form as “screen memories” (148)
A “group of physical processes,” including “purely internal acts” (149) such as “phantasies” and “emotional impulses” (148), in relation to which the term “forgetting” is something of a misnomer — if only because, in these instances, something is “remembered” by a patient “which could never have been ‘forgotten’” as “it was never at any time noticed — was never conscious” (149)
The type of “forgetting” associated with the concepts of Nachträglichkeit or après-coup, which Freud now canvasses in this way:
“There is one special class of experiences of the utmost importance for which no memory can as a rule be recovered. These are experiences which occurred in very early childhood and were not understood at the time but which were subsequently understood and interpreted. One gains a knowledge of them through dreams and one is obliged to believe in them on the most compelling evidence provided by the fabric of the neurosis” (149)
Unlike (d), the “purely internal acts” which were not in the first instance “conscious” at all, (e) these items were proper experiences that had, Freud hypothesizes, been originally “conscious,” but which — owing to their retroactively-conferred “traumatic” significance at some subsequent point — were profoundly repressed beyond the point of any direct recall. These scenes are rather “posited” in analysis, or inferred from “evidence” preeminently including "the fabric of the neurosis” (149). (Here the editors direct us to Freud’s “Wolf Man” account. But we ought also to compare this argument with the “Constructions” piece written rather late in Freud’s life.)
At this place, Freud’s overview of developments in analytic technique becomes especially pertinent. For, notwithstanding their purported limitations, the original “hypnotic treatments” could still be credited with an appealing simplicity vis-à-vis “the process of remembering” (148) — a process that reliably generated a “delightfully smooth course of events” (149). By contrast, an analyst practicing the latest iteration of technique can by no means take this “smooth course” for granted. As a rule, it appears, the form taken by “remembering” in analysis is rather unlike the direct, literal sort induced under hypnosis. Instead, as Freud now puts it,
“we may say that the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it” (150)
In accordance with the tripartite title of the piece, then — “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” — the middle section (150-154) develops the causes, meanings, and implications of “repetition,” especially in the clinical context.
Freud claims that the patient’s conduct during analysis — embracing patterns of thinking and feeling, as well as “action” per se — regularly echoes some childhood prototype that is not itself remembered. To consider Freud’s examples: the adult patient may be “defiant and critical”; or ensnared in a “helpless and hopeless deadlock”; or “intensely ashamed.” In each of these instances, the patient unknowingly recapitulates some early dynamic concerning — we are told — his or her attitude toward parents; or frustrated reaction to “infantile sexual researches”; or shame and anxiety around “certain sexual activities” (150).
(Transference, it soon appears, is one type of these repetitious phenomena, in which what is “old” and consciously forgotten nevertheless persists in putatively “new” contexts. I say “putative,” of course, since, from the standpoint of the neurotic patient’s unconscious, the present is not “new” at all, but a simple prolongation of the original situation, the “old”; and, further, in accordance with this unconscious conviction, the patient practically “shapes” the new context — say, the analytic relationship — after the old model.)
There is a wonderful ambiguity in Freud’s use of this concept — “repetition” — and the article capitalizes on it. Sometimes it appears that repetition is an alternative to memory: that which we cannot or will not “remember” — say, the old defiance of childhood — is “repeated” instead. At other times, though, it appears that this repetition is, not an alternative to remembering, but precisely a type or “mode" of remembering, albeit a “primitive” and frequently unfortunate one. This ambiguity is hardly surprising. Freud had characterized the “symptoms” of conversion-hysteria in a roughly similar way. From nearly the beginning of Freud’s intellectual development, in other words, he’d tended to view the manifestations of neurosis — the paralyzed leg, the vomiting — as symbolic “repetitions” of some original, conflict-ridden state of affairs, and — for just that reason — ways of unconsciously preserving or remembering that experience.
This oscillation between “repeating or remembering,” on the one hand, and “repeating as remembering,” on the other, lasts the entire article. The piece’s rhetorical impact requires both uses: repetition must be acknowledged both as something distinct from remembering and as the unconscious effort to accomplish precisely that. So, for instance, at one moment, speaking of the repressed experience, Freud writes that the patient “reproduces it not as a memory but as an action” (150); and, at another moment, that “this compulsion to repeat…is his way of remembering” (150). Hence we might say that, in its narrow sense, remembering is counterposed to repetition. In its broad sense, though, remembering encompasses repetition, which represents one form memory may assume.
Now Freud continues: “What interests us most of all is naturally the relation of this compulsion to repeat to the transference and to resistance” (151). This “naturally” might strike the reader as perplexing and unmotivated — why the focus on the connections to these concepts rather than any others? We ought to remind ourselves, then, that in the “History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” published the same year, Freud isolated “transference” and “resistance” as the criterial differentia of legitimate psychoanalysis.
In a verbally playful phrase, Freud indicates that, from one perspective, transference is merely one kind of “repetition”; but from another, equally defensible perspective, repetition is a kind of “transference”:
“We soon perceive that the transference is itself only a piece of repetition, and that the repetition is a transference of the forgotten past not only on to the doctor but also on to all the other aspects of the current situation” (151)
Indeed, the consequences of repetition are not restricted to the “treatment” itself. “[T]he compulsion to repeat…now replaces the impulsion to remember” (151) both within the transference and beyond it, spilling over into all sectors of the patient’s life. In Freud’s words, the repetition is observable “not only in his personal attitude to his doctor but also in every other activity and relationship which may occupy his life at the time” (151).
On the other hand, as regards the second differentia of psychoanalysis:
“The part played by resistance, too, is easily recognized. The greater the resistance, the more extensively will acting out (repetition) replace remembering. For the ideal remembering of what has been forgotten which occurs in hypnosis corresponds to a state in which resistance has been put completely on one side.” (151)
In other words, the presence of repetition in the treatment — its prevalence, frequency, and intensity — is a measure of resistance. The direct and transparent remembering evinced under hypnosis, it seems, obviates any need to “act out.” It is only because this direct path is obstructed by resistance — whose job it is precisely to protect the mental status quo, to shore up the repressions — that some indirect, unconscious substitute is required.
At this point we might pause to naively ask: why must a person strive to remember the repressed experience at all — if not directly (under hypnosis, for instance), then in the roundabout guise of “symptoms” or “repetitions”? How do we explain this purported conatus of the human being towards remembering? According to Freud’s dynamic conception of the psychical system, it seems, repressed material inevitably presses for “discharge,” a “return" into awareness, as a kind of counter-thrust to that repression. But if we no longer accept this “energic” account as anything but a metaphor — and a limited one — then it seems we will need some other way of explaining things.
In any case, the economics of the analytic situation appear zero-sum: the neurotic in analysis will remember, in one way or another. So, we may imagine the analytic situation in the following, mildly absurd, “quantified" way. Let us say that the patient has 10 “units” of neurotic — i.e. repressed and pathogenic — “memories” that must ultimately be recovered in a successful analysis. Freud’s argument indicates that, if 3 of these units are recollected directly (as they might be under hypnosis, or even spontaneously with the application of the latest “method”), we can expect the remaining 7 to be repeated, “acted out,” and the like. The desirability of the ratio in a given case, it follows, is finally an inverse function of the resistance involved. Where there is little or no resistance, the unconscious memories will presumably surface directly as “remembering,” at a ratio of 9:1; where resistance is entrenched, the ratio is turned around to 1:9, and nearly all memories are “recovered” — at least initially — only as repetitions.