Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud Page A

considerable effort that the patient had to expend when forced to overcome his hostility towards his free associations (in accordance with the basic rule of psychoanalysis). Then finally the rigorous technique of the present time evolved whereby the physician no longer focuses on a specific factor or problem, but is quite content to study the prevailing surface-level of the patient's mind, and uses his interpretative skills chiefly for the purpose of identifying the resistances manifest there, and making the patient conscious of them. A new kind of division of labour then comes into being: the physician reveals the resistances that were hitherto unknown to thepatient; and once these have been overcome, the patient often recounts without any difficulty the situations and contexts that he had forgotten. The goal of these various techniques has of course remained the same throughout; in descriptive terms, to fill the gaps in the patient's memory; in dynamic terms, to overcome the resistances brought about by repression.
    The old technique of hypnosis still deserves our gratitude for having shown us in discrete and schematized form a number of psychic processes that occur in analysis. It was thanks to this alone that we were able to develop the boldness, within psychoanalytic practice itself, to create complex situations and keep them transparent.
    ‘Remembering’ took a very simple form in these hypnotic treatments. The patient reverted to an earlier situation, which he appeared never to confuse with his present one, conveyed the psychic processes of that earlier situation in so far as they had remained normal, and in addition conveyed whatever resulted from translating the unconscious processes of that time into conscious ones.
    I shall add a few remarks at this point that every analyst has seen confirmed by his own experience. 2 The forgetting of impressions, scenes, experiences comes down in most cases to a process of ‘shutting out’ such things. When the patient speaks of these ‘forgotten’ things, he rarely fails to add I've always known that really, I've just never thought about it.’ He not uncommonly expresses disappointment that so few things seem to want to come to mind that he can acknowledge as ‘forgotten’, things that he has never thought about again since the time they happened. Even this yearning, however, is capable of being gratified, particularly in the case of conversion hysterias. 3 The term ‘forgetting’ becomes even less relevant once there is due appreciation of the extremely widespread phenomenon of screen-memories. 4 In quite a number of cases of childhood amnesia, 5 that familiar condition so important to us in the terms, I have gained the impression that the amnesia is exactly counterbalanced by the patient's screen-memories. Thesememories contain not merely
some
essential elements of the patient's childhood, but
all
such elements. One simply has to know how to use analysis to retrieve these elements from the memories. The latter represent the forgotten childhood years as completely as the manifest content of dreams represents the dream-thoughts.
    The other group of psychic processes which, as purely internal acts, can be contrasted to impressions and experiences – fantasies, relationary processes, 6 emotional impulses, thought-connections 7 – need to be considered separately as regards their relationship to forgetting and remembering. Something that occurs particularly frequently here is that something is ‘remembered’ that can never have been ‘forgotten’, since it was never at any point noticed, never conscious; moreover it appears to make no difference whatsoever to the psychic outcome whether such a ‘connection’ was a conscious one that was then forgotten, or whether it never reached the status of consciousness in the first place. The conviction that the patient arrives at in the course of analysis is entirely independent of this kind of memory.
    Particularly in the