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). Such states might range, according to the strength of the repression, from "complete recollection to total amnesia" (1893a, p. 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. 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.Īmnesia, 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. 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. 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." ). 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. The phenomenon of the absence of a memory prompted Freud to posit the existence of an unconscious mnemic trace. 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. (When defined by Freud simply as the normal "fading of memories," by contrast, the idea of amnesia belonged to the psychology of consciousness rather than to the metapsychology of the unconscious.)Īmnesia 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. Amnesia concealed mnemic traces of traumatic events and, more generally, contents of the unconscious. 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. 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. The notion of amnesia is of neuropathological origin, but for Freud it was not functional defect in the registering of memories.
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