From Memory to Fantasy

The mnemic and the desire that stems from instinct combine to make what Freud calls the wish, and wishes combine in narrative form to make fantasies. According to Derrida, the Project is interested in establishing memory as "not a psychical property among others [but] the very essence of the psyche" (201). Given that the "mnemic" and "perceptual" are intrinsic parts of fantasy, and the centrality of the role played by instinct in all of Freud’s systems, the y system could be considered more of a fantasy system than a memory system, combining the forces of external Q and instinctual Qh in the breaches that make up the scene of writing of the psyche. The y system of the Project can be read as a harbinger of Freud’s transition away from memory-based theories such as the seduction theory, and memory-based methods such as the cathartic method, to fantasy-based theories such as the varieties of oedipal psychoanalysis. We also see the conflation of memory and wishes (fantasy) in Freud’s discussion of "ideas" and "wishes" in the latter part of the Project. As with his later primal phantasies, the origin of Freud’s apparatus will conflate what is mnemic and what is derived from instincts. Since Freud argues that instincts are the source of fantasy and the product of a species memory of sorts, these two categories can never simply be separated. With primal phantasies, as with the origin of the psychical apparatus of the Project, Freud will rely on a certain mixture of idealism and materialism when it comes time to account for an origin. Regardless, there is never memory as an engram, uninfluenced by fantasy; and there is never a fantasy that is not made up of both memory and desire, fantasy’s brick and mortar. Neither exists without the other. This muddling of these categories, I will argue, is both a strength and weakness of psychoanalysis.

In the Project, Freud wrote that a "psychological theory deserving any consideration must furnish an explanation of memory" (299), but he would wait until 1925 and his "Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’" to return to memory in any systematic way. According to Freud’s own criteria here, psychoanalysis actually would be in danger of not deserving consideration, especially since, as Derrida points out, Freud abandons the Mystic Pad as a writing metaphor for memory.

In 1899, a couple years after he began thinking of infantile sexuality, but years before he would systematically incorporate it into his theorizing, Freud wrote his essay, "Screen Memories," which describes a psychical construction that appears as an unusually clear memory of an apparently insignificant event, and whose analysis leads to both childhood experiences and unconscious fantasies. "Like the symptom," Laplanche and Pontalis explain, "the screen memory is a formation produced by a compromise between repressed elements and defense" (Lap67 411). In "Screen Memories," Freud recounts a dialogue with a patient, who many suspect is Freud himself. The patient recounts his "memory," and Freud interprets it as a combination of two fantasies:

I want to stress that I think this part of Freud’s early theorizing is important: memory should never be thought of as completely separate from fantasy. Yet this is a far cry from an etiology of hysteria based on the veracity of childhood memories that "emerge" during puberty as the result of Nachträglichkeit. And it is an even farther cry from the phylo-"genetic" "memories" that, despite the ontological situation, override all other memories. This quotation, like the moments in the Project where memory is a product of a differential relation of forces, is a moment of early Freudian theory that lends itself to a "scene of writing" of différance. One of the strengths of the "Screen Memories" essay is its recognition of the effects of fantasy on what are experienced as memories. But Freud takes this to an extreme so that his endogenous and idealist "phantasies" and wishes become the over-riding determinant, the Überdeterminierung, that cancels out all the chance of "external reality."

What is important here for my purposes is that "Screen Memories" is an excellent example of Freud’s transition away from the memory-based "seduction" theory to a theory based on phantasmatic constructions. In this case, I would say it is an admirable one away from the traditional conception of memory as engram–though it may be toward a traditional conception of memory as ideal or "unerasable" (Der78 230) trace. But this transition toward an unerasable trace would require Freud’s working out of his masterplot according to his Oedipal theories of sexual difference. The memory-fantasy constructions of "Screen Memories" Freud would later associate with infantile sexuality, but his transition from the pre-sexual child of the "seduction" theory and Nachträglichkeit to the infantile sexuality of oedipal psychoanalysis was not complete at this time, as evidenced by Freud’s discussion of the "pre-sexual period" (VII 31) of childhood in the Dora case, which was written immediately after "Screen Memories." Regardless, Freud here has moved away from hysterics "suffering mainly from reminiscences" and toward a fantasy-based psychology that does not explain memory as much as eclipse it by fantasy–or rather, memory as some type of representation of an experience is no longer a factor during childhood, that time of life Freud consistently points to as the most determinate. As Freudian theory progressed in time, memory as some "scene of writing" of différance, an example of a radical concept of trace, became even more buried by Freud’s logocentrism. In fact, what Freud calls "screen memories" are more "screen fantasies" that defend against the effects of the chance Freud associates with "events" or "reality," and Derrida associates with différance and the erasable trace.

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