1 Panel IPA on Memory . Haydee Faimberg Haydee Faimberg (Paris ...

1 <strong>Panel</strong> <strong>IPA</strong> on Memory . Haydee Faimberg 

Haydee Faimberg (Paris) 

Presentation on the <strong>Panel</strong> on Memory 

Chaired by Ted Jacobs 

Disposing of 20 minutes and being very curious about our discussion, I have 

chosen to directly share with you a fragment of a session, which, paradoxically, 

was used in an essay not to illustrate the problem of memory as such. Having said 

that, I think it is impossible to work in psychoanalysis without having the implicit 

concept of unconscious memory as a basis for our psychoanalytical listening. 

So I am attempting to discover, retroactively, in which way I actually worked at a 

particular session with reference to our topic, ‘memory’. 

The patient, a man of around 30, looked like an adolescent and remained 

psychically inaccessible for a long time. 

After several years of analysis, the patient and I had been able to discover, with 

surprise, in what way the unconscious relation to his father had deprived him of a 

psychic space of his own. Up to that time I had to contain in my countertransference 

the anxiety of apparently not existing for him and of being unable to 

interpret in the sense of creating an opening into his inaccessible psychic space. 

The ‘alienated narcissistic unconscious identification’ we discovered at that time 

(as I have called this kind of identification, Faimberg 1981/85), had allowed us to 

understand, retroactively, his almost total psychic inaccessibility in the sessions. 

But here I shall speak of a session that took place about one year after that 

discovery. 1 The patient begins by saying: 

‘I asked my mother about Auntie Rita. She was quite surprised at my knowing 

of her existence, and asked me how I knew about her. I remembered her. I 

don’t know if I had always remembered her, but recently I realized I knew 

she existed. My mother told me that Rita was confined to a psychiatric 

hospital. I asked her how long ago had she been sent there, and she told me it 

had happened when she (my mother) was expecting my brother. I was five at 

the time. My mother never went to see my aunt and never talked about her. 

But my other aunt often went to see her. […]’. 

My patient adds that in these three months he has asked his mother many 

questions. He says that the mother told him that ‘when my brother was born I 

stopped playing and talking, and I was never the same again’. 

Looking now at the patient’s discourse I am struck by the idea that what he is 

bringing to the session (‘I was never the same again’) is related to the main 

difficulty in his analysis: his psychic withdrawal (‘I stopped playing and talking’).


So after several years of analysis, the patient had began to change his psychic 

functioning in particular, as I said, having discovered an alienated identification 

with the way his father had disavowed his own (the father’s) history. The 

conditions were created in analysis for him to remember that aunt Rita did exist. 

Springing from this memory he was then able to ask his mother the necessary 

questions and then, and only then could the mother talk and tell this silenced story, 

which concerns: both the disavowed existence of the mother’s sister and my patient 

in the process of having a brother at five. 2 

After this parenthesis let us go on with the session. 

The patient says ‘[…] All this happened three months ago, but for some 

reason I’ve been unable to tell you until now. During these three months I 

found out where she was and I asked my brother, who is a doctor, to see if 

she was well taken care of. I have been visiting her, telling her all that has 

happened in the twenty-five years she has been isolated from the world. […].’ 

The patient added that he felt guilty at having hidden all this from me, but he just could 

not do otherwise. 

From my side, as his analyst, I felt quite amazed at his narrative. First, when I heard that 

‘he remembered he had an aunt and had asked his mother the appropriate questions 

and received the appropriate answers’, I felt emotionally close to him, as he was 

emotionally close to me too. I thought that we were both succeeding in overcoming his 

emotional withdrawal, his silence, his psychic suffering, his hopelessness. But then, 

when he told me he had ‘been hiding all this discovery from me’ I found myself 

surprisingly excluded as analyst. 

I was able to overcome the first experience of having been killed as an analyst when I 

realised that at the same time there was something new in our relation: he conveyed that 

he felt deeply guilty at having kept secret up to now this important situation and that he 

was aware that he had not been able to do otherwise for unknown reasons. So the 

transference condensed various contradictory kinds of relationship. 

The fact that he was able to convey feelings of guilt led me to assume that I existed as 

an excluded person for him, and that my existence had not been painlessly suppressed in 

his psyche (as was the case in the first years of his analysis). 

Let us note that he is also able to ask his mother when aunt Rita had been confined to a 

hospital. This opening into temporality coincides with his making me hear the links 

between this situation and his own psychic change: he says (quoting his mother’s 

words) ‘I stopped playing and talking and I was never the same again’. 

2


In relation to remembering, in the publication I made of this case I wrote: ‘It may be 

assumed that the memory of the aunt’s existence, together with all that the patient did in 

order to reintegrate her […] represented his acceptance of his mother’s pregnancy and 

his brother’s birth’ (he told me, for the first time, that his brother is now a doctor). 3 

As we all know, in Freud’s article of 1914 he distinguishes between two forms of 

memory: ‘reproduction in the psychical field’ (remembering in the narrower sense) and 

‘reproduction in action’ (repeating). 

I shall follow Hans Loewald in ‘Perspectives on Memory’ (1972/1976) and replace 

‘reproduction in the psychical field’ by ‘representational memory’, preconscious 

memory. ‘Reproduction in action’, repeating, is called by Loewald ‘enactive memory’, 

which is an unconscious memory; being unconscious, it shares the ‘timelessness and 

lack of differentiation of the unconscious and of the primary process.’ (Loewald 

[1972/76]). 

Reproduction in action, repeating, enactive memory, according to Freud, is sometimes 

‘The’ way the patient has of remembering. Repeating includes not only acting out and 

transference repetition but ‘also identificatory reproductions’. (Loewald 1972/76); 

‘alienated narcissistic unconscious identifications’ (Faimberg 1981/1985). 

As we shall be seeing in the clinical case all these aspects are relevant. 

In relation to the session, we may say that at the same time as the analysand shows that 

he remembers the existence of aunt Rita (‘representational, preconscious memory’) and 

dispels the secret maintained by the mother, he also says that he had been keeping 

secret from me this entirely new situation. 

Therefore, and this is recognised by us (the patient and myself) retroactively, there was 

a secret between us (posed by the patient), which constitutes an ‘enactive memory’, an 

identificatory reproduction, a repetition in the transference. As we know this 

constitutes another way of remembering. 

My conclusion would be that we simultaneously discover in this session both kinds of 

memory: the representational and the enactive. 

This conclusion, elaborated in the perspective of this panel, happens to be coherent with 

the following interpretation I proposed at that session 4 : 

Analyst: ‘You had to do everything secretly, because only in that way were you able to 

transmit the secret aspect of the question. You didn’t know how to talk about a secret; 

all you could do was to subject me to the secret and “exclude” me. In this way I would 

become the isolated person, who knows nothing, feels nothing, does not exist. That is 

how you felt, just like your aunt.’ 

So we see that both kinds of memory are giving each other reciprocal meaning in a nonlinear, 

dialectical causality. 5


Analysing the structure of the interpretation we may say: that I established a link between 

1) the patient’s activity of secrecy towards the analyst as a form of repetition in the 

transference (the patient’s way of remembering) and 2) the patient’s remembering 

(representational remembering) the up to now secret existence of the aunt. 

In this case repetition is no longer his only way of remembering. 

In other words one kind of memory gives meaning to the other: each one shedding light 

on the other in a dialectic causality: i.e. both forms of secrecy give reciprocal meaning to 

each other. 

Generally speaking we may say that both kinds of memory might be at stake in analysis 

in a complementary and dialectical causality. 

Listening to the way my patient was listening to my interpretations I heard that he was 

able to follow these links. This ‘listening [to the patient’s] listening’ function of the 

analyst, gave me the hint that he would be able to listen to a construction of a more 

integrated experience of time. 

By my listening I imply an emotional listening as well as a decentred listening. 

So after a brief silence I found the words to complete my previous interpretation. Let us 

recall that I had come to interpret: ‘by excluding me with the secret I became the isolated 

person, who knows nothing, feels nothing, does not exist. That is how you felt, just like 

your aunt.’ 

Then I added the following construction: 

‘But now you can say to yourself, say to your aunt, and say to me that time has 

passed, that you have a brother who is now a doctor.’ 6 

Here I am putting words to the enactive memory, which have included, as we saw, 

identificatory reproductions 7 8 as well as repetition in the transference and acting out. 

5 This clinical sequence may be taken as an example of this dialectic tension between both kinds 

of memory. At the same time the discovery of how these two forms of memory are articulated 

adds indeed a different theoretical understanding to the basic implicit assumptions of my 

interpretation. It must be said that I have studied this session from another theoretical perspective, 

which I shall not be able to mention in this short presentation, but can be consulted in my book, in 

particular in chapters 1,3,10. 

6 ‘The mother had repudiated the existence of the aunt, and this had happened when the patient 

should have gone through the experience of jealousy and exclusion evoked by his mother’s 

pregnancy. But aunt Rita did not exist, nor did the patient in feeling the exclusion, even feel jealous 

at his brother’s birth. It was the very sibling identity that was denied in its existence. The exclusion


Freud in the same article of 1914 we are considering in this congress writes’…something 

is “remembered” which could never have been “forgotten” because was never at any time 

noticed –was never conscious. As regards the course taken by psychical events it seems 

to make no difference whatever whether such a thought connection was conscious and 

then forgotten or whether never managed to become conscious at all. The conviction 

which the patient obtains in the course of his analysis is quite independent […].’ This 

quotation anticipates Freud’s formulation in ‘Constructions in analysis’ (1937) in relation 

to ‘conviction of the truth’. (italiques added) 

As we wrote with Antoine Corel, based in a paper written by him (1975) ‘sometimes 

there is nothing to remember: we do not expect the construction to be confirmed by a 

memory as a sign of the lifting of repression. It is not a matter of filling gaps in the 

memory. Rather we construct an unprecedented link, something that can be put into 

words for the first time.’ 

The ‘conviction of the truth’ referred to by Freud manifests itself 1) in the surprise shared 

by patient and analyst 2) in the retroactive understanding of the repetition 3) in the 

access to new versions of psychic truths. In general we may say that the construction is 

validated by the discontinuation of repetition and by the appearance of new material. 

(Faimberg and Corel 1989) 9 . 

I cannot explain now why I think that the listening to listening function helps to 

overcome the dilemma of interpreting in the present or interpreting in the past. 10 I shall 

only say that the past, which is not yet past but only a present continuous, becomes the 

patient’s past in the analytical working through, often by constructing something that for 

the first time finds the words to express it. 

When reading Hans Loewald’s essays on memory for this panel, I was extremely 

surprised and happy to see that even if this and other cases, which I could have presented, 

are not directly related to the concept of memory as such, my standpoint was compatible 

and even converged with Loewald’s ideas. Both the following quotations are in amazing 

consonance with our own conclusions. 

Loewald (1955, page 41) writes: 

‘It is often clear that in a so-called recovery of a childhood memory we are confronted 

not with the recall of something forgotten, but with a creative event in which something 

for the first time can be put into words.’ 

And now let us conclude with this beautiful passage by Loewald: 

7 

Which constitute the alienated narcissistic unconscious identifications with the mother’s 

disavowal of the existence of a sibling 

8 

or from my perspective ‘alienated narcissistic unconscious identifications’.. 

9 

Chapter 3 in The Telescoping of Generations : Listening to the Narcissistic Links


‘We would say that the patient instead of having a past is his past. He does not 

distinguish himself as rememberer from the content of his memory.’ (Loewald 1972/76, 

page 165) 

Haydee Faimberg 

Paris, June 2007 

(References in next page)


References 

Faimberg, Haydée (1981/1985) ‘The Telescoping of Generations: A Genealogy of 

Alienated Identifications’ in Faimberg, Haydée The Telescoping of Generations: 

Listening to the Narcissistic Links Between Generations, London and New York: 

Routledge 2005. 

-- (1981)’ “Listening to Listening”: an approach to the study of narcissistic resistances’ in 

Faimberg, Haydée The Telescoping of Generations: Listening to the Narcissistic Links 

Between Generations, London and New York: Routledge 2005. 

Faimberg, Haydée and Corel, Antoine (1989) ‘Repetition and Surprise: Construction and 

its Validation’ in Faimberg, Haydée The Telescoping of Generations: Listening to the 

Narcissistic Links Between Generations, London and New York: Routledge 2005. 

Freud, Sigmund (1914) ‘Remembering, repeating and working-through’, The Standard 

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1950--74), Vol. 12, 

London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. 

--(1937) ‘Constructions in analysis’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological 

Works of Sigmund Freud (1950--74), Vol. 23, London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of 

Psychoanalysis. 

Loewald, Hans (1955) ‘Hipnoid State, Repression, Abreaction and Recollection’ in 

Papers on Psychoanalysis New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1980. 

--(1972/76) ‘Perspectives on Memory’ in Papers on Psychoanalysis New Haven and 

London: Yale University Press 1980.

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