Screen Memory - Department of English

(Bogaç 73). 8
There is another systematic split in psychoanalysis–-
conscious/unconscious–-and it also is crucially inflected by
memory. In a seemingly paradoxical turn, memory belongs only to
the unconscious: Freud “only acknowledged memory insofar as it is
unconscious, denying to consciousness even the capacity of
memory” (Leclaire 76). In one sense, the rationale for this
seeming paradox is almost simple-minded, the sort of mathematical
thinking that lay behind Augustine’s cavern, Déscartes’
intellectual memory, or Bergson’s soul: that consciousness is not
sufficiently capacious to store all our perceptions and thoughts,
“Consciousness has no capacity for the retention of anything”
(Freud 5.540).
A more complex version of this difference, according to
Terdiman, is that the unconscious “lodges an integral and
unchanging reproduction of the past (though not the past our
conscious self has lived), whereas consciousness circulates a
mobile and ungroundable representation of these contents to which
direct access is theoretically impossible. These two memories
cohabit within us but cohere nowhere” (1993:289-90). The process
of nächtraglichkeit allowed Freud to conclude that leaving a mark
in memory and being conscious of something are independent
processes: “such memory-traces, then, have nothing to do with the
fact of becoming conscious” (18.25). The impression of an
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