Memory
The term "memory" (Fr. mémoire) is used in two different ways in Lacan's work.
Contents
Symbolic Concept
In the 1950s, memory is understood as a phenomenon of the symbolic order, related to the signifying chain.
It is related to the concepts of remembering and recollection, and opposed to imaginary reminiscence.
Not a Biological or Psychological Concept
Lacan makes it clear that his concept of memory is not a biological or psychological one.
"The memory which interests psychoanalysis is quite distinct from what psychologists speak of when they display its mechanism to us in an animate being in an experiment."[1]
For psychoanalysis, memory is the symbolic history of the subject, a chain of signifiers linked up together, a "signifying articulation."[2]
Something is memorable and memorized only when something goes wrong with memory, when the subject cannot recall a part of his history.
It is the fact that he can forget, that a signifier can be elided from the signifying chain, that makes the psychoanalytic subject distinctive.[3]
Biological or Physiological Concept
In the 1960s Lacan reserves the term "memory" for the biological or physiological concept of memory as an organic property.[4]
It thus no longer designates the symbolic history of the subject which is the concern of psychoanalysis, but something which lies outside psychoanalysis altogether.
References
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 1955-56. Trans. Russell Grigg. London: Routledge, 1993. p.152
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. p.223
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. p.224
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. p.42
