Amnesias of a Freudian Kind, Part II

Part II

This essay is the second of a two-part series that examines Freud's constructions of amnesia as they participated in "forgetting," both within the mechanisms of his psychoanalytic project and, far less investigated, as a way to fix the borders of his idea of an unconscious. As argued in Part One (O'Donoghue, 2021), the operations of forgetting that Freud would identify with repression were in fact constituted by a preceding removal from memory, one that was discursive rather than psychical. Significant events were banished from view—or, better, hidden in plain sight—by being enunciated as valueless, or as Freud said of his early years in Vienna, "nothing was worth remembering" (Freud, 1899, p. 312). What remained were selected fragments of one's past that were interpretable as markers of repression, and as such tied to specific a priori drives whose sexual or aggressive impulses necessitated their inaccessibility to consciousness. This allowed for a schema to be placed on the vagaries of an individual life and desires, and those that were irreducible to such characterizations, originating with Freud's own early life, were rendered forgettable.

Freud's specific uses of the term "amnesie" have received surprisingly little attention, a fact that can be attributable to its lack of psychoanalytic gravitas—in contrast to repression—and as such it functioned as a descriptor that could be applied more fluidly. Several of its streams, including Freud's earliest published discussion of amnesia, as well as its later "infantile" version, were charted in the first portion of this study. We turn now to its presence within Studies on Hysteria (1895), where we find a striking example of expungement as Freud attempted to treat a patient by making her "reminiscences" permanently inaccessible. After discussing this case, we will consider several genealogies that have been offered for Freud's attempt at such an extreme memory effacement. The essay concludes with a discussion of suppression, posited here as a form of amnesic erasure that, enacted by Freud as a conscious way to delimit the content of unconscious phenomena, was never, not surprisingly, privileged within the construction of psychical life that resulted from it.

Hysteria, Amnesia, and Discontent

In his treatment of "Emmy von N," likely occurring in brief periods during 1888 and 1889, Freud, in his "first attempt" (Breuer and Freud, 1895, p. 48) at hypnotic intervention—and his first recorded clinical case—was able to remove "melancholy things" from her memory by "not only wiping out her memories of them in their plastic form [but] by removing her whole recollection of them" (p. 61). The narrative of "Emmy," his pseudonym for Fanny von Sulzer-Wirth Moser (1848–1924) was documented in Studies on Hysteria (1895) as a series of journal entries detailing the episodes of sustained contact that Freud had with her. He added a subsequent self-reflection on the case in 1924, in a footnote to a later edition (1925) of Studies that Strachey added at the conclusion of the case, where Freud observed that "no analyst can read this case to-day without a smile of pity" (p. 105, n. 1). Such a comment intimates that Freud, by this point in the codification of his psychoanalytic project, was comfortable enough to proffer such a retrospective revelation of naïveté. Over a decade after this admission he penned a letter, in July of 1935, to Fanny Moser's daughter and namesake that appears to be his last word on the case.¹ There he defended his inability to correctly identify the elder Moser's condition (rather baldly stated to her daughter as "unconscious hatred for her two children") because at that point he "didn't know anything," having not yet understood the workings of the "hidden psyche" (Tögel, 1999, p. 1165). In an earlier correspondence with this younger Fanny Moser, in 1918, he claimed that he had stopped his use of hypnosis (it was "meaningless and useless") because of this case, with this abandonment resulting in "the incentive to create psychoanalytic therapy more in accordance with reason" (Andersson, 1979, p. 14). These...