Remembering and Forgetting

By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.


Clients often say they have no memories of their childhood that they can recall. They may not have had an abusive childhood, no trauma that they can recount, and lots of normal things may have happened to them and their siblings. That’s not to say they don’t experience difficulties in their adult lives because they obviously do. But they never connect these two things.
It probably sounds strange when you put it down in black and white this notion of not having any childhood memories. But, in fact, it is more frequent than you would think. Many people who come to therapy, and even those who don’t, see it as a blithely normal phenomenon in their lives that they have few early personal memories. They put it down simply to being that kind of person, having a bad memory.
After working for a number of months with one particular client recently he said he could remember a time in his early life when things were difficult for him. He didn’t think much of it as he spoke. But then he remembered the reasons why things had been so difficult at this time; a change had taken place in his living arrangements. This prompted another memory of other changes that occurred and how he had not adapted well to those changes either.
He looked at me and wondered how it was that he hadn’t thought of this period in his life before now. And suddenly he remembered another detail of this period that was again linked to what he had already remembered. And on and on it went until bit by bit he had built up a fuller picture of a time in his early life that he had not remembered, and felt he was unable to remember, for many years.
Psychoanalytic theory is rich in research and ideas on the notion of repressed memory. Most people assume that only the very bad stuff gets repressed. But that is not the case. Often mundane, fun, friendly, cheerful or encouraging memories get buried along with some particularly upsetting or unpleasant experiences. Nor does the business of repression end in childhood. There is an ongoing repression that can follow through into adolescence and adulthood.
That is why remembering is so important. And why the assumption you have forgotten when in fact you have not been able to remember is so significant. Yes, some people do have bad memories; there is no doubt about that. Not remembering names and faces or where the car keys were put down are intrinsically human traits. But to have whole swathes of one’s life effectively hidden from memory is a different matter. There is a different energy at work here. And it is like living without a past.
It is natural to try and hide this shortcoming. People will talk about anything else in therapy, usually current experiences, in order to mask this deficiency. But when a client stays the course and is able, as the client I mentioned above, to put a single marker down on the icy slopes of memory, then it is a wonderful beginning. This becomes the new, and in some cases, the first foothold from which the climb can begin. Maybe that’s why we call the business of undergoing therapy ‘work’. Once this foothold is established it allows for another foothold to be established and so on until they form the links between the daisy chain of memory that stores our life experiences and runs back and forth through our lives. A lot of memories will be ordinary, run-of-the-mill and some won't. But each carries a rich emotional charge that resonates through our being once it is re-found and re-experienced.
The great French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan famously said: ‘We are not cured because we remember, we remember because we are cured.’ So if there is a test of whether therapy is working or not perhaps it is this: that we can have at our disposal the dense tapestry of memories that make up who we are. And that we can engage with them without being afraid or sad or angry or inappropriately overjoyed.