Between Past and Present: on the Psychoanalytic Preoccupation with Memories and Life History

Psychoanalysis focuses both on the patient's inner life history and on what happens in the actual analytic situation. Psychoanalysts differ in the extent they pay attention to memories and the past or to the actuality of the analytic session as such and in the extent they link both. The main goal of this paper is to give an overview of ideas in the history of psychoanalytic thought on the relationship between past and present. The paper examines five possible positions: historicization (the past colors the present), actualization (back and forth between past and present), dehistoricization (the here and now), posteriority (the present colors the past), and natality (present without link with the past). New positions are added to old ones rather than replacing them. Together, all the positions testify to a lively dynamic in psychoanalysis that both repeats and transforms itself in everyday analytic thinking and practice.