Conflict Resolution: The Banal and the Significant (Freud, Wk 2)

Reading several smaller articles by Freud first formed a theoretical foundation for reading his longer case studies, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (better known as “Wolf Man”), “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis” (“Rat Man”), and “Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria (Dora).” In “Fetishism,” Freud explains the perversion of obtaining sexual gratification with an object that stands in for the mother’s phallus; the fetish is both the mother’s phallus and not her phallus (castration, the wound, all repressed). “Family Romances” plays out the familial relationships that take place during the early childhood development of neurotics because their parents are the only authority figures they know and they experience both sexual and asexual relationships with them. “Note on the ‘Magic Notepad’” likens a children’s toy, a dual-layered writing pad upon which a stylus leaves physical impressions, to the apparatus of memory, which also has a reusable surface with a lasting impressionable surface beneath. In “Lapses,” Freud investigates the reason behind why humans misspeak, misread, miswrite, mishear, etc, and determines that we all produce meaningful “slips” based on sound similarities, verbal similarities, and word associations. For me, “Screen Memories” was the most fascinating and helpful of the shorter articles, as it provides a necessary concept through which to read the three case histories that follow.

“Screen Memories” argues against the idea that memory holds on to what is most important and discards what is deemed unimportant by suggesting instead that there are two psychical forces at work, one which wants the event remembered and another, a resistance, which would rather the event be forgotten. The conflict between the two is held in this compromise: the banality of the scene is retained to remind the person that something significant did, in fact, take place here, but the significance of the scene has been “displaced” onto the banal fragment, the “screen memory,” or the flick of an image that seems so silly, why would we remember it? Freud was able push specific screen memories through the apparatus of his psychoanalytic method in order to reveal the meaning of the image fragment; he believes that the insignificant portion that is remembered stands in for another part that’s concealed. He’s considering the memory when he continues:

We must first ask ourselves why it suppresses what is significant, but retains what is of no consequence. It is only when we penetrate more deeply into the mechanism of such processes that we arrive at an explanation. We then conceive the idea that two psychical forces are involved in producing these memories. One of them takes the importance of the experience as a motive for wanting it remembered, but the other – the force of resistance – opposes this preferential choice. The two contending forces do not cancel each other out, nor does the one motive overpower the other, with or without loss to itself.

The verbs and adjectives alone depict a raging battle taking place within memory. The memory itself is already hostile: it “suppresses,” “retains,” “forces,” “takes,” “opposes,” and “prefers.” The two battling forces within memory “do not cancel,” one motive “does not overpower” the other. This kind of language lays out a spatial scene with dueling (dualing) psychic powers held in abeyance (by?); there’s a tone of aggression and propriety, of judgment and power. Freud’s use of authoritative, violent language lends to the feeling in this sentence that we’re dealing with a dangerous and perhaps volatile situation; that he’s saying this about everyday, “normal” people is surprisingly radical. But if the motives and forces are so hostile as they are here depicted in Freud’s language, if the reader comes along to “penetrate,” “arrive,” and “conceive,” does the memory/do memories welcome the outside “force” into their ménage a trios or resist? (This force is, after all, so powerful as to arrest the very sentence in which Freud writes it with the phallic ins and outs of the long dash.) Is the reader engaged in necessary conflict? To play out the metaphor to its implied but perverse end, is the reader a rapist, leaving the text impregnated with his own ideas? How does this fold back into Freud’s notion of psychoanalysis and the work of interpretation? (To adopt a Freudian rhetorical technique, I’ll say to the reader that if my metaphor of rape seems crass or far-afield, remember that it was Freud himself who encouraged this very word play when one analyzes.)

Freud literally demands that readers ask themselves the question that’s on his mind, the one about how the memory suppresses what’s significant, but substitutes the pronoun “it” for the word to which it refers, “memory.” Freud’s own act of suppression is noteworthy in this context because the suppression of the word “memory” takes place in a sentence about suppression, an idea in which the word “memory” is most significant. Freud then takes us on a journey to impregnate the memory as readers, enticing us the entire way with his subtle commands, “we must first ask,” “when we penetrate” (oh, and we will penetrate), and “we then conceive.” He positions readers at first outside the memory but then within it, there to conceive another pair “producing” their own ideas. As I, the writer, am now positioned outside the text and must follow Freud’s example to penetrate, arrive, and conceive, producing my own ideas. As you, reader, will now follow our example and are now penetrating, arriving, conceiving. The text is always unfolding.

The way that this passage sets up the memory as a hostile environment in need of a good penetration suggests that there is no way for readers to come into the idea (pun intended) without preconceived ideas (yes, you’ve conceived before!) because memory (and Freud’s writing of it) itself operates on a conceptual/conception model which insists it be “conceived” through multiple penetrations and arrivals. Though Freud doesn’t raise his favorite refrain about sexual differentiation and its comrades the castration complex and the wound, his descriptive choices reveal that even the mechanism of memory requires its own sexual gratification, metaphorically speaking.

[I apologize that there's no page reference numbers; I had to read this essay on Kindle which doesn't paginate.]