Remembering the Rememberer: Freud and Lacan’s Contributions to Understanding Memory

Abstract

This paper explores the theoretical contributions of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to our understanding of memory, with a focus on the nature of memory and the mechanism of repression. While Freud conceptualises memory as a system of psychical representations and traces – often distorted by repression and archeologically layered – Lacan reconfigures memory within the structure of language (particularly within the ‘gaps’ between the signified and the signifier). For Freud, the function of repression is to conceal traumatic, painful or unacceptable experiences, which then reemerge (otherwise known as ‘the return of repressed’) through dreams, slips, or symptoms. Meanwhile, Lacan, drawing on structural linguistics, reframes this process as the return of a failed or foreclosed signifier, emphasising the role of the Real and the symbolic system in shaping subjective experience. Freud’s model of memory assumes that the subject has a potential capacity of recovering repressed content through analytic insight. In contrast, Lacan presents the subject as inherently split and constituted through the desire of the Other, making memory a construction rather than a retrieval. Following an examination of the key distinctions between Freud’s and Lacan’s theories of memory, the paper offers a brief discussion of how these ideas have influenced psychoanalytic clinical practice.