Remembrance, trauma and collective memory: the battle for memory in psychoanalysis

In contemporary clinical theory in psychoanalysis, remembering life-historical events and reconstructing the past have lost the central therapeutic function that they had for Freud. The author describes this development and demonstrates the way in which trauma and its remembrance resist it. He discusses the problem of the truth status of memories. Traumatic memories are not subject to transformation by the present when they are retrieved. They constitute a kind of foreign body in the psychic-associative network, but rather than forming an exact replica of the traumatic experience they undergo specific remodellings. The author describes some of the psychic processes in this encapsulated realm. Resolving its predominant dynamics and extricating phantasy from traumatic reality require a remembrance and reconstruction of the traumatic events in the analytic treatment. The author goes on to describe the vital importance of social discourse concerning historical truth for both the individual concerned and society in connection with disasters defined as man-made. A reluctance to know often sets in here that stems from the desire to avoid confronting the crimes, the horror and the victims' suffering. With the Holocaust in particular, the further problem arises of how to avoid its subjugation in historical description to defining categories that eliminate the horror and traumatic nature of the events. Remembering crimes unfolds a special set of dynamics. The author describes both these dynamics and their transgenerational effects on post-war German society. He concludes that, in order to confront the problems posed by a multifaceted traumatic reality, it is also necessary to battle to restore memory to an appropriate place in psychoanalysis.