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The notion of amnesia is of neuropathological origin, but for Freud it was not functional defect in the registering of memories. Rather, he looked upon amnesia as a symptom resulting from repression, as a phenomenon which could be circumscribed but which was not a defense mechanism. He compared infantile amnesia to hysterical amnesia, of which in his view it was the forerunner, both forms being connected with the child's sexuality and Oedipus complex. Amnesia concealed mnemic traces of traumatic events and, more generally, contents of the unconscious. (When defined by Freud simply as the normal "fading of memories," [1893a, p. 9] by contrast, the idea of amnesia belonged to the psychology of consciousness rather than to the metapsychology of the unconscious.)

Amnesia was not a psychoanalytical discovery, but, beginning with his earliest psychoanalytical writings, notably the Studies on Hysteria (1895d), Freud interpreted it in terms of repression; in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), he extended the discussion to infantile amnesia.

In the development of Freud's thought, it was the neuropathological idea of amnesia that showed the way to his formulation of repression, even though, structurally speaking, amnesia was a result of repression. The phenomenon of the absence of a memory prompted Freud to posit the existence of an unconscious mnemic trace. Since he did not consider amnesia to be a defense mechanism, he sought to account for it in another way, namely by the mechanism of repression. Thus in the Three Essays, comparing infantile amnesia to the hysterical amnesia that he felt it foreshadowed, he saw both as the outcome of the repression of sexuality, especially childhood sexuality, which he described as polymorphously perverse ("Neuroses are, so to say, the negative of perversions." [p. 165]).

The patient was "genuinely unable to recollect" the "event which provoked the first occurrence, often many years earlier, of the phenomenon in question," which is why it was necessary "to arouse his memories under hypnosis of the time at which the symptom made its first appearance" (1893a, p. 3). The lifting of amnesia was the precondition of the cathartic abreaction of the affects bound to the trauma, the memory of which had been effaced: this was Freud's first theory of the neuroses, namely the theory of the traumatic causality of hysteria.

Amnesia, however, did not in this view succeed in completely wiping out the memory of the trauma, for patients suffered from obsessions, from hallucinatory visions, from what seemed like foreign bodies within their psyches. So long as no abreaction of affects took place, a struggle continued to rage between amnesia and hysterical obsessions, giving rise to "hypnoid states" of a consciousness riven by conflict. Such states might range, according to the strength of the repression, from "complete recollection to total amnesia" (1893a, p. 12). In this light, amnesia could be seen as the ultimate outcome of that defense by means of the "dissociation of groups of ideas" which until 1900 Freud held to be typical of hysteria, and which later he described as the result of repression (an adumbration of the notion of splitting might also be discerned here).

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argued that the forgetting of dreams was not "a special case of the amnesia attached to dissociated mental states," for in all cases "repression . . . is the cause both of the dissociations and the amnesia attaching to their psychical content" (1900a, p. 521). As Freud moved from the theory of traumatic hysteria to the theory of dreams, therefore, his conception of amnesia evolved from dissociative splitting to repression.

It was on the basis of the durability of the impression attached to the trauma (concealed by amnesia but finding expression in symptoms) that Freud hypothesized the existence of an indestructible unconscious mnemic trace, which helps us understand how, to begin with, he had conceived of the mnemic trace as a so-called "unconscious memory." The German term "Erinnerungsspur," whose literal meaning is "memory trace," covered both the (paradoxical) idea of an unconscious memory, which is to say a memory that has succumbed to amnesia, and the idea of an unconscious mnemic trace.

In 1900 Freud asserted that mnemic traces were indestructible; in 1895 he had observed that impressions associated with traumatic seductions preserved their sensory intensity and freshness when amnesia protected them from the wearing-away process that they would have undergone had they not been buried in the unconscious. By thus insisting upon the sensory vividness of what amnesia concealed, Freud depicted a quasi-hallucinatory mode of psychic representation consonant on the one hand with a post-traumatic accentuation of impressions that led in particular to the constitution of "mnemic symbols," and, on the other hand, with his later theoretical claim that unconscious ideas were necessarily figurative in nature.

The notion of amnesia, though it cleared the way for the psychoanalytical notions of the unconscious and of repression, itself remained a phenomenological idea belonging to descriptive psychopathology and marked by the idea of deficiency even if it went beyond it. While amnesia certainly meant a contraction of conscious memory that was not attributable to any functional deficiency of mnemonic fixation, it nonetheless implied a diminution of the capacities of the ego. The forgetting imposed by amnesia (for it was not intentional) was the effect of a defense mechanism that was itself unconscious, namely repression. Such forgetting was experienced, painfully, as consciousness of a repression either under way or already completed; and amnesia could also be the outcome of defense mechanisms other than repression (projection, splitting, foreclosure).

Since new repressions are always in the making, remembering does not make it possible to lift the amnesia completely. In "Constructions in Analysis" (1937d), Freud used the same terminology as in 1895 or 1900, but his standpoint had changed. He continued to think, to be sure, that the aim of analysis, starting, say, from "fragments of [the patient's] memories in his dreams" (p. 258), was to induce remembering, to lift amnesia. But he now felt that this procedure could never be total and that it could not even be embarked upon unless repetition—notably the manifestation of affective impulses in the transference—was taken into account. Inasmuch as amnesia continued to obscure entire aspects of the past, it was impossible ever to reconstitute that past in its entirety, and the analyst must be content to (re)construct it on the basis of what took place during analysis. This is not to say that Freud abandoned his fundamental historical perspective and embraced fictions, but simply that he redefined interpretation, independently of amnesia and its removal, as "probable historical truth" (p. 261).

This "probable" truth, as opposed to the whole truth, belongs to the episteme of modern history. How can the correctness of a construction be proved? One aspect of such a proof is connected to the set of problems surrounding amnesia and its lifting: communicating an accurate construction to the analysand may on occasion cause a temporary aggravation of the symptoms and the production of "lively recollections . . . described [by the patient] as 'ultra-clear"' and involving not "the subject of the construction but details relating to that subject" (p. 266).

Infantile prehistory, when the infant can barely speak, was in Freud's view affected by amnesia in a very particular way, and amnesias coming into play in later years, including hysterical amnesia, were derived from this primary structural amnesia, the concept of which brought Freud close to the idea of primal repression. What appeared as amnesia was indeed sometimes attributable to primal repression. In "'A Child Is Being Beaten"' (1919e), analyzing an infantile beating-fantasy, Freud emphasized, apropos of its most important phase (being beaten by the father), that "it has never had a real existence. It is never remembered, it has never succeeded in becoming conscious. It is a construction of analysis, but it is no less a necessity on that account" (p. 185). Here amnesia affects not a forgotten event but rather a fantasy about which there is no necessity to claim that it was at one time conscious. In such cases the amnesia could be removed only partially, as for example when "an elaborate superstructure of day-dreams" (p. 190) represented the fantasy in an indirect way. Here at last the notion of amnesia was completely absorbed by that of repression.

As noted above, "amnesia" is a term belonging to phenomenological psychopathology rather than to psychoanalysis: it refers to the symptom rather than the cause, and it connotes a lack (a-mnesia), which places it close to ideas of deficit. With respect to the psychology of consciousness, it points up the existence of the unconscious in one of its most spectacular effects. But if it opens the door to the metapsychological ideas of mnemic traces and repression, its affiliation with phenomenological psychopathology and cognitive psychology means that it belongs at once to several disciplines: amnesia is involved with the mnemonic "recalling" of information concerning a traumatic area, but a psychogenic causality does not exclude a cognitive or neurophysiological one.

Finally, since amnesia is centered entirely on a reduction of conscious memory, it is not compatible with the later developments in Freud's thinking on constructions in analysis, although it is true that the accuracy of a construction may bring about the removal of amnesia—thus tending to confirm that Freud never completely abandoned the theory of traumatic seduction and the amnesia to which such a seduction gave rise. In "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through" (1914g), Freud argued that the "fabric of the neurosis" itself provided "compelling evidence" for the reality of events experienced by the subject "in very early childhood and . . . not understood at the time" (p. 149); in other words, neither the lifting of amnesia nor even a reconstruction of the past was required-a proposition that amounts to a radical refutation of any "verificationist" epistemology. Psychoanalysis is concerned with historical truth, with infantile and psychic realities lying on a different plane, ontologically speaking, from amnesia and that which amnesia conceals, even if the latter can indeed show us the way to the former.

FRANÇOIS RICHARD

See also: Black hole; "Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest"; Forgetting; Infantile amnesia; Lifting of amnesia; Memory; Mnemic symbol; Mnemic trace/memory trace; Psychoanalytic treatment; Remembering; Reminiscence; Repression.