“living memory”: discussion of avishai margalit's “nostalgia”

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Page 1: “Living Memory”: Discussion of Avishai Margalit's “Nostalgia”

This article was downloaded by: [Selcuk Universitesi]On: 21 December 2014, At: 04:19Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Psychoanalytic Dialogues: TheInternational Journal of RelationalPerspectivesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hpsd20

“Living Memory”: Discussion of AvishaiMargalit's “Nostalgia”Lewis Aron Ph.D. aa New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy andPsychoanalysis , New York , NYPublished online: 14 Jun 2011.

To cite this article: Lewis Aron Ph.D. (2011) “Living Memory”: Discussion of Avishai Margalit's“Nostalgia”, Psychoanalytic Dialogues: The International Journal of Relational Perspectives, 21:3,281-291, DOI: 10.1080/10481885.2011.581110

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Page 2: “Living Memory”: Discussion of Avishai Margalit's “Nostalgia”

Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 21:281–291, 2011Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1048-1885 print / 1940-9222 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10481885.2011.581110

“Living Memory”: Discussion of Avishai Margalit’s“Nostalgia”

Lewis Aron, Ph.D.New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy

and Psychoanalysis, New York, NY

Avishai Margalit raises questions about how memory can be a moral and an ethical concern, and inthis commentary on “Nostalgia,” Aron expands on these themes and examines the place of mem-ory in psychoanalysis and in Judaism. The study of memory and of mind are inseparable. At itsbest, psychoanalysis does not contrast thoughts and actions, inner and outer, memory and motoraction, intrapsychic mental life and interpersonal external behavior as simple dichotomous terms butrather views these as mutually defining transformations, different views of a single complex reality.Conceived in this way, memory is not a static internal picture, but rather is continually constructed,embedded in our interpersonal context. It is living memory.

It is a pleasure and a privilege to discuss this paper that was presented by Avishai Margalit inTel-Aviv. Having this IARPP event held in Israel is particularly meaningful to me because ofthe role that the land of Israel and the Hebrew language play in my own heritage, and I drawon that connection in a personal way in this discussion. Memory is a theme that not only is ofextraordinary significance for psychoanalytic theory and clinical work, but also lends itself sowell to interdisciplinary collaboration, as is evident in this paper. Professor Margalit not only isan internationally acclaimed academic philosopher, but also has been actively engaged in work-ing for peace, supporting an ethical social and political stance, advocating for human rights, andspeaking as an international public intellectual, although as we learned in his paper, he also hassome direct clinically relevant experience. I want to use this excellent opportunity to speak up forthe importance of our participating and collaborating in mutual exchange and dialogue with aca-demics, activists, humanists, scientists, and professionals outside of our clinical psychoanalyticdiscipline. It is important both to communicate our thoughts to them and to enrich and enlivenour own thinking by engaging with their ideas and criticisms.

Margalit (2002) is well known for his important contribution, The Ethics of Memory, and wesee how relevant his concerns with the ethics of memory are to our own concerns with the psycho-dynamics of memory. Here are a few lines from my favorite of his books, one that has influenced

This article was first presented at the opening panel of the International Association for Psychotherapy &Psychoanalysis conference “The Shadow of Memory: Relational Perspectives on Remembering and Forgetting,”Tel-Aviv, June 24, 2009.

Correspondence should be addressed to Lewis Aron, Ph.D., 78 Country Club Drive, Port Washington, NY 11050.E-mail: [email protected]

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me a great deal with regard to ethics, politics, and the role of the public intellectual, the 1998Views in Review: Politics and Culture in the State of the Jews. In describing the contributions ofMartin Buber, he writes,

A central question here is how, among all the objects that the ego succeeds in thinking about, anotherperson comes to be perceived not as just another object but as another subject—that is, a beingwho itself originates thoughts. . . . I would describe the point of origin with the phrase “We meet.Therefore I am.” The basic element of the human world is relations rather than objects, and theserelations consist of unmediated encounters. The “I” is derived from these encounters. (p. 125)

I hope those lines give you a small taste of why Margalit was such an inspired choice for arelational event.

Margalit takes up the important question of how memory can be a moral issue, when memoryand forgetting, like belief or faith, to which he compares it, does not seem to be fully in ourcontrol. If we are not autonomous agents of our memory, then how can we be morally respon-sible? And yet, as he points out, Jewish tradition is filled with the commandment to rememberas well as injunctions to forget. I extrapolate from traditional Jewish sources to comment on theplace of memory in psychoanalysis. But there is no need to be Jewish or to accept any religiousbeliefs or doctrines in order to follow my argument or its implications for psychoanalytic the-ory and practice. Even with limited knowledge of other religions I could easily find parallels inother theologies, and many of you will be reminded of other religious and secular traditions withsimilarities and differences.

The Hebrew Bible has no hesitation in commanding memory, using the word Zachor[Remember] no less than 169 times (Yerushalmi, 1982). Clearly there is an expectation thatwe can remember both as individuals and as a people. Remember the commandments, remem-ber the exodus from Egypt, remember the Sabbath day, remember the destruction of the temple,remember our enemy, Amalek. We should also remember that memory is a mutual and relationalobligation. God too promises to remember God’s people, and in our prayers we call out to God tokeep his promise, a moral/ethical injunction, “Remember us with fondness,” “Remember yourlove of our ancestors,” Remember the oath You swore to our ancestor Abraham,” “RememberJerusalem, Your holy city,” and so on.

The Amalekite tribes were nomads who attacked the Hebrews in the desert of Sinai duringtheir exodus from Egypt.

Remember what Amalek did to you on the way as you came out of Egypt, Zachor ait asher asahlecha Amalek, how he attacked you on the way when you were faint and weary, and cut off your tail,those who were lagging behind you, and he did not fear God. Therefore when the Lord your God hasgiven you rest from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Lord your God is giving youfor an inheritance to possess, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven; you shallnot forget. (Deuteronomy 25:1–19)

“LO TEESHKACH”

As a child I remembered not to forget that on Purim (since Haman was constructed in rab-binic tradition as an Amalekite in cyclical time) I had to write the word Amalek on the solesof my shoes so that I would literally wipe out the name Amalek with every step. But I admitthat I barely and only halfheartedly passed this particular tradition on to my children because

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of my reservations about its ethical implications. Clearly memory and forgetting do have moralsignificance. And yet, these matters are complex and paradoxical. Consider, if we did not remem-ber to wipe out the name of Amalek, and if we had not enacted that memory, then who todaywould remember Amalek?

The paradox of having to remember, not to forget, an entity that has been wiped out, erasedfrom memory, reminds me that Steve Mitchell liked to quote Adam Phillips, who ironicallyquipped about Bion’s injunction to listen to patients without memory or desire, that the analyst“had both to remember to do this, and want to” (as cited in Mitchell, 1997, p. 191).

But ordinary experience makes clear that memory is a moral issue, or an ethical one, givenMargalit’s classification of ethics when dealing with thick relations. When a husband forgetshis wedding anniversary, his wife considers this an ethical failure and his poor memory is notaccepted as an excuse. If parents forget their children’s birthdays we would judge them as failingon ethical grounds, as these are “thick relations.” In my view, the difficulty comes about becauseof an unfortunate split between inner and outer, in which we dichotomize these two areas ofexperience (ideation and behavior, faith and law) instead of seeing them as dialectically relatedand mutually constituting each other. When as a boy I was taught and encouraged to enact thewiping out of Amalek by writing the name on my shoes; this enactment, an external behavior,a ritual, may be thought to have expressed an inner intention, but I think it is more accurate tosay that the behavior didn’t so much express an inner ideation so much as it created the memory.Following Wachtel (2009), external behavior may be usefully viewed as creating mind, just asmuch as we may understand mind to express itself in behavior. My memory of the commandmentto remember, and to wipe out, actually consists of my memory of its enactment, and I’d add thatmy memory is a nostalgic one since at the time that it was first constructed I was oblivious to theethical consequences of such an intention. Nostalgia is a form of splitting. There are momentswhen I nostalgically long for a time of simple distinctions between “us” and “them,” friends andenemies. This can even go so far as idealizing genocide as doing “God’s work.” Thus, Margalitrightfully warns of the dangers of vicarious nostalgia.

The study of memory and of mind are inseparable; as Hans Loewald (1980) pointed out,the words memory and mind are etymologically related (p. 145). Throughout his life, Freudwas known to have an outstanding mind and memory, a photographic memory from the timeof his childhood. Freud (1910) himself italicized the passage, “Our hysterical patients sufferfrom reminiscences” (p. 16). The recovery of forgotten memories was for a long time regardedas the essential indicator of psychoanalytic progress. It was, however, as long ago as 1940 thatFranz Alexander (1940) said that remembering “is more the result or a sign of the progress ofthe analysis than the cause of it” (p. 13). And Alexander first heard that idea from Ferenczi(1925/1980), who wrote that not only does remembering lead to insight and behavioral changebut the reverse, behavioral change can lead to memory and insight: “The awakening of a memory,can—as in catharsis—bring an emotional reaction with it, but an activity exacted from the patient,or an emotion set at freedom, can equally well expose the repressed ideas associated with suchprocesses” (p. 216). Since then the place of memory has been challenged across the variousschools of psychoanalysis with emphasis given instead to the here-and-now, to the immediacyof the transference as a total situation, to the analysis of defense, and to enactments. In recentyears, we have been caught up in “the memory wars,” have seen a revolution in cognitive studiesof memory, and have begun to benefit from neuropsychological studies of the topic.

Freud’s notion of memory and biographical narrative was never simple or linear. He spokeof nachträglichkeit (deferred action or retroactive traumatization) constantly and with emphasis.

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It’s a concept that complicates memory in the most interesting ways, approaching ideas that haveonly recently become popular in chaos theory and nonlinear dynamic systems theory. As earlyas 1896, Freud pointed out that the subject revises past events at a later date so that the mindis constructed through complex layers of stratification and rearrangement (as cited in Masson,1985, p. 207). For Freud the past is constantly constructed and reconstructed in line with currentprojects and dynamics. The origin of psychoanalysis in Freud’s self-analysis was intertwinedwith his study of memory and its distortions, and his model from early on was a constructivistmodel of memory, far ahead of his time.

The recognition of this fact must diminish the distinction we have drawn between screen memoriesand other memories derived from our childhood. It may indeed be questioned whether we have anymemories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess.Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at thelater periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memoriesdid not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a numberof motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in theselection of the memories themselves. (Freud, 1899, p. 322)

Freud’s paper on screen memories, from which this quote is taken, is significant in relation toMargalit’s nostalgic recollections of his own childhood, as it is for my own memories and forour understanding of history and historiography. Memory and historical recollections alwaysserve both expressive and defensive functions. Earlier memories screen later events every bit asmuch as later memories screen earlier events. We always need to listen to others and to our-selves in a variety of registers, with both what Paul Ricoeur (1970) termed a “hermeneutics ofsuspicion” (p. 27) and something more like what biblical scholar Tikva Frymer-Kensky (2002)called a “hermeneutics of grace” (p. 353). For psychoanalysis time moves bidirectionally, withpast, present, and future mutually creating and re-creating each other. In this sense, all memoryis screen memory, simultaneously screening forward and backward.

It was Jacques Lacan who first highlighted the significance of nachträglichkeit in Freud’swritings, but it was Hans Loewald who incorporated this complex view of time into his overallwork. Loewald (1980) wrote,

We encounter time in psychic life primarily as a linking activity in which what we call past, present,and future are woven into a nexus. The terms themselves, past, present, future, gain meaning onlywithin the context of such a nexus. The nexus itself is not so much one of succession but of inter-action. Past, present, and future present themselves in psychic life not primarily as one preceding orfollowing the other, but as modes of time which determine and shape each other, which differentiateout of and articulate a pure now. There is no irreversibility on a linear continuum, as in the com-mon concept of time as succession, but a reciprocal relationship whereby one time mode cannot beexperienced or thought without the other and whereby they continually modify each other. As termsthey are correlative, like the terms father and son; as experiential phenomena they interpenetrate.(p. 144)

It should be understood in light of our contemporary rediscovery of dissociation and enactmentthat for Freud, what is retroactively revised and reworked are not memories of lived experience,but rather what gets retranscribed are precisely what we have been unable to assimilate into ameaningful context (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973). Traumatic memories are not contextualized,the context being other associations—hence the term dissociation, a concept that troubled Freud

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largely because of its embeddedness, in his era, in a theory of degeneration, with its stronglyanti-Semitic connotations.

Removed from a meaningful context, traumatic memories are beyond meaning, beyond words,beyond symbolic communication. One of Freud’s major themes, contrary to current misrepre-sentations of his thought, is that what are repressed are events that could not be put into words,organized, or contextualized, and therefore are expressed in enactment and other symptoms ratherthan in memory. But they also could be exempt from the usual processes of retranscription andtransformation by present circumstances, their content being inflexible and unalterable, leavingthe trauma atemporal, literal, and fixed (Bohleber, 2007).

The current idea that dissociation refers to experiences that were never formulated in wordsand that repression, in contrast, refers to ideas and feelings that were formulated in words andonly then actively pushed out of memory does not seem to me to be supported by a careful readingof Freud’s texts. It must be acknowledged that quoting Freud can always serve as a basis fordrawing diametrically opposed conclusions. As a Jew in fin-de-siècle Vienna, Freud occupied aposition on the margins and was always navigating his way between complex binaries, and so hiswork is the basis for both conservative and radical projects. But when it comes to “remembering”feelings, fantasies, thought connections, Freud (1914) clearly states,

In these processes it particularly often happens that something is ‘remembered’ which could neverhave been “forgotten” because it was never at any time noticed—was never conscious. As regards thecourse taken by psychical events it seems to make no difference whatever whether such a “thought-connection” was conscious and then forgotten or whether it never managed to become conscious atall. (p. 149)

Nor was Freud oblivious to the special circumstances induced by psychical trauma or to theunique effect of trauma on memory and the wide range of special defenses used to cope withtrauma, referring to them as “special mental protective devices.” Even late in his career, Freuddespaired of being able to penetrate into the consequences of trauma on the mind. He wrote ofthe irreducible subjectivity of understanding others who always remain objectively unknowable.

No matter how much we may shrink with horror from certain situations—of a galley-slave in antiq-uity, of a peasant during the Thirty Years’ War, of a victim of the Holy Inquisition, of a Jew awaiting apogrom—it is nevertheless impossible for us to feel our way into such people—to divine the changeswhich original obtuseness of mind, a gradual stupefying process, the cessation of expectations, andcruder or more refined methods of narcotization have produced upon their receptivity to sensationsof pleasure and unpleasure. Moreover, in the case of the most extreme possibility of suffering, spe-cial mental protective devices are brought into operation. It seems to me unprofitable to pursue thisaspect of the problem any further. (Freud, 1930, p. 89)

Bruce Reis (2009) carefully reviewed that Freud’s long-held conception of memory, emphasizedthe centrality of action in memory phenomena. He argued that Freud’s approach to repeating inaction as a form of memory finds validation in our most contemporary cognitive sciences, whichemphasize subsymbolic, procedural, and implicit forms of memory. I would also point to Freud’sconcept of primal or primary repression, which while remaining a somewhat obscure notionreflects a form of repression prior to words and based on “very intense archaic experiences”connected to excitations “breaking through the protective shield” that is related to early trauma(Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, p. 334). Ferenczi (1923/1980) referred to the idea of “primal repres-sion” and defines this as repression of events “before they ever reach consciousness” (p. 77).

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Ferenczi (1925/1980) wrote,

It is also possible that certain early infantile unconscious pathogenic psychic contents, which werenever conscious (or preconscious) but which date from the period of “unco-ordinated gestures ormagical behavior” can not be simply remembered at all, but can only be reproduced by a re-living inthe sense of Freud’s repetition. (p. 217)

And in the last years of life, Ferenczi (1932/1955) will write about trauma that “cannot beremembered because it has never been cs. It can only be re-experienced and recognized as past”(p. 278). None of the previous selections support the current popular understanding of repressionas referring to material that was once known and accessible, formulated, and actively shut outfor defensive purposes.

Ferenczi argued that we privilege present experience because only through live experience inthe here-and-now can we recognize the past as past. Ferenczi never abandoned a conviction thatthese current experiences needed to be analyzed in the context of the historical past, and in facthe was highly critical of Rank, whose thinking developed in a less historical direction (Ferenczi,1927). Those were earlier “memory wars,” nachtraglichkeit, all over again. In psychoanalysis,we do not dwell on the past in order to heighten its significance, but to the contrary, we lingeron memories to divest them of their power to limit present day learning and experiencing. In his1959 classic, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, Philip Rieff wrote,

Memory for Freud, is not a passive receiver whose performance can be measured quantitatively; itembodies a moral choice, a sequence of acceptances and rejections. Forgetting is active; it is not theabsence of an action, something dropped out of the container mind. . . . Repression thus becomes aninfallible index of ethical import. (p. 38)

Recall one of Rieff’s most memorable lines, “What is too imperative to be remembered suffersthe compliment of being forgotten” (p. 38).

While psychoanalysts have continued to revise our understanding of memory, especially inrelation to trauma, in my reading, these are not new relational discoveries; they are implicitand explicit in Freud’s work. What is new, what Freud did not grasp, was the interpersonal andinteractional nature of memory that has been so elegantly and usefully featured in the workof Stern, Bromberg, and Davies, among others, such that memory is state dependent, includ-ing self-state dependent, and that the state of one’s self fluctuates in the interpersonal contextof the state of the other. “We meet. Therefore I am.” Characteristically, Freud examined theintrapsychic dimension of memory and not its interpersonal context and regulation. In his elegyto Freud, Lionel Trilling (1955) began by saying, “It has always been true that a chief rea-son for the alienation of one generation from another lies in their different understandings ofwhat constitutes the past” (p. 9). It is not only that we remember Freud differently, but alsothat we all remember different Freuds! There are many histories of psychoanalysis. Is mine anostalgic reading?

In his beautifully written meditation, Freud’s Requiem, von Unwerth (2005) traced Freud’sviews on memory to his acceptance of Lamarckian theory, which was common in his day. ForFreud, as for Lamarck,

memory was life’s motivating agent, the force that gave it its shape and sense. For both scientistsmemory was like blood, a life-giving archive of recollections coursing through the race. Humanity

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as a whole was the vessel of this mnemonic history, of which individual lives were mere repetitions.(p. 109)

The implication was that all individuals carry within them, in their very biological being, theirgerm-plasm, the whole of human experience. Collective memory outlives us, as do our genes.Memory is immortal; this conception is according to von Unwerth, as close as Freud, “theGodless Jew,” gets to belief in an afterlife. Of course, Freud rejected any religious notion ofan afterlife. For Freud (1916), life had meaning precisely because it was transient; its signifi-cance was limited to what we ourselves gave it within the context of our own emotional lives.The transmission of memory is Freud’s secular version of an afterlife, and it is memory that linksour past to our future, our origins to our destiny. Inherited memories are also as close as Freudcomes to describing or explaining what we now term “intergenerational transmission.” Time andmemory are central moral concepts for Freud since they are tied closely to life’s meaning andsignificance in spite of loss, mourning, and inevitable death. The Ba’al Shem Tov, founder ofHasidism, said, “Redemption lies in remembering.” These words are inscribed on the entrance tothe House of Memorial to the victims of the Holocaust at Yad VaShem in Jerusalem.

It is no accident that Yosef Hayim Yerushami followed up his 1982 book, Zakhor: JewishHistory and Jewish Memory with his 1991 Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable.The first is a study of Jewish history and historiography, exploring the place of memory in Jewishthought and practice, whereas his study of Freud’s Moses begins with the observation that his-tory and memory are the foundations of psychoanalysis, both theoretically and therapeutically.Yerushalmi pointed out that while the historical events of the biblical narrative are long gone,they are experienced psychologically as alive and current, existing outside of linear time. Heused the same example as Margalit to illustrate his thesis, and I stay with this illustration as well.Discussing the commandment to remember the Exodus from Egypt, Yerushalmi takes up thePassover Seder as an example of Jewish memory in practice.

For whatever memories were unleashed by the commemorative rituals and liturgies were surely nota matter of intellection, but of evocation and identification. There are sufficient clues to indicate thatwhat was suddenly drawn up from the past was not a series of facts to be contemplated at a distance,but a series of situations into which one could somehow be existentially drawn. . . . The entire Sederis a symbolic enactment. . . . Both the language and the gesture are geared to spur, not so much aleap of memory as a fusion of past and present. Memory here is no longer recollection, which stillpreserves a sense of distance, but reactualization. (p. 44)

The central obligation of the Passover service is that “in every generation one is required to seeoneself as if he (or she) had gone out of Egypt.” B’chol dor vador chayav adam lir’ot et atzmok’ilu hu yatza mimitzrayim. Seeing oneself does not refer to an internal eidetic experience alone.The memory must be enacted, and the current experience of feeling like a slave being set freeis enacted behaviorally, ritually, through sensory experience and motor action, in our posture, inthe foods we ingest, the smells we breathe. Thus, we eat matzoth the bread of affliction, and thebread of haste, we eat the maror, bitter herbs, to smell and taste slavery, we recline while eatingso as to feel our free status, we literally get up and open the door to let in Elijah, who will bringthe messiah. The examples are endless. The point is that memory is not just an inner experiencebut rather the obligation to remember is fulfilled in the act of telling, studying, and teaching, aswell as in the ritual enactment, in the behavioral sensory-motor expression.

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Jewish law requires1 that we tell our children about the exodus, and the word used for telling—Ve-higgadta, from which is derived the word Haggadah—is typically used to refer to witnessing,haggadat edut. We must be witnesses to the exodus. But a witness cannot give hearsay testimony.A witness must testify about what he or she directly experienced, and so we are obligated todirectly experience ourselves being freed from Egypt. This cannot be achieved only internallybut requires direct physical, external, observable activity and sensory experience.

Memory is one of the fundamental components of an awareness of time; without memorythere is no time. Time also allows thought about the future, what is yet unborn or still to come,anticipation. Passover, along with the Sabbath, recalls the past liberation and anticipates thefuture redemption. This memory is not just cognition but must be lived out. It is the enactment ofmemory that links the past and the future, our history and our destiny. In this regard, nostalgia—“if only fantasies” as Akhtar (1996) called them—go together with “someday” fantasies; they areboth “fantasies of ideal times” (p. 737). Longing and hope, Eden and the Messiah, pathologicaloptimism and inordinate nostalgia, are related forms of idealization in which we love time and/orhate time for bringing us closer to or taking us further away from our dream (Levine, 2009).

According to Soloveitchik (2009), in ancient Jewish law, a Jewish slave was exempt from pos-itive commandments with a fixed time. The reason for this is that a slave’s time is not his own andso the slave was thought to lack the time experience of a free person. Being liberated from slav-ery thus means attaining a sense of time as our own, historical awareness, memory, anticipation,appreciation of the moment in a wider context, human subjectivity. So-called primitive peoples(slaves, and women, too, as first pointed out by Simone de Beauvoir) were thought to lack a senseof history and subjectivity, which became the privileged possession of the colonizer (Brickman,2003). Freud’s (1915) famous notion that the unconscious is timeless thus structuralizes as inter-nal the relations between the colonizer and the colonized. Ogden (1994) also attributed a lack ofhistoricity to the paranoid-schizoid position; only with the depressive position do we become sub-jects. But Ogden’s notion is more dialectical, in that the paranoid-schizoid position contributesto the sense of immediacy and intensity of experience, while the depressive position provides ahistorically rooted sense of self with continuity over time. Without a sense of time one cannotappreciate the present moment as one’s most precious possession. The immediacy of the momentonly has significance because of its transience, as Freud described so memorably. “Transiencevalue is scarcity value in time” (Freud, 1916, p. 305), or more simply, as Freud told Anna, “Oneenjoys the moment, because it is transient” (von Unwerth, 2005, p. 193). But note that to appre-ciate the moment for its transience implies that one has the larger time frame in mind, an ongoinghistorical awareness.

Soloveitchik (2009) wrote,

Indeed, the mitzvah of sippur Yeziat Mizrayim [the commandment to tell of the exodus; italics added]does not exhaust itself in a historic review of bygone events that have vanished completely. It is morethan that it is a drama charged with emotion and tenseness, participating in the past. Past events which

1I draw on the teachings of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, known in the Jewish world as the Rav, one of the leadingAmerican Rabbinic authorities of the 20th century. The work cited here was published in English in 2009 but is basedon much earlier lectures. Rabbi Soloveitchik became the head of the Rabbinical school of Yeshiva University in 1941and served until 1986 when illness kept him from continuing, and he passed in 1993. I had the privilege of hearing himlecture in the early 1970s and will never forget the intensity of that experience.

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are not re-experienced belong not to history, but to archeology. Archeology involves past events thatoccurred once upon a time, disappeared, and—while they may be reproduced by memory—are notalive anymore. They are not re-experienced; there is no retrospection of the archaic. Memory isnot just the storehouse for latent impressions; there is also a living memory, [italics added] whichreproduces and re-experiences the past. (p. 16)

The Haggadah emphasizes that we left Egypt in a hurry, with Matzah referred to as “the bread ofhaste.” Why does it matter that we left in a hurry? For Soloveitchik, this is another indication ofthe significance of time consciousness. We become a freed people with an awareness of time, asevidenced by the first commandment given to the people in Egypt: “This month shall be to youthe beginning of months.” Freedom, human subjectivity, autonomy come with an awareness oftime, and hence with memory of the past and anticipation of a future.

Toward the end of the service (after reciting Hallel or praises), we thank God “who redeemedus and redeemed our forefathers from Egypt.” The Rav asks why at this point in the service we putourselves ahead of our ancestors who actually lived through the event, whereas in earlier prayerswe mention the ancestors first. He explains that by this point in the service we have directlyexperienced ourselves as having been redeemed. It is only when we praise God in joy at havingourselves been liberated that we can mention ourselves first. The Rav writes, “We will sing anddance; we will cry and shout; we will shed tears and embrace people. The experience of YeziatMizrayim [the Exodus] on the night of Pesach should be so overpowering, so overwhelming,that we should act it out” (p. 101). “The experience should be dynamic, explosive, hypnotic,breaking through the surface and impelling the person to act” (p. 121). This is not memory as apredominantly cognitive or intellectual function, but “living memory,” and it is living memorythat is at the heart of meaningful and effective, life-transforming psychoanalysis. Notice that inthis formulation, memory and action are not inversely related or antagonistic, but rather it is whenmemory is at its peak that it leads to action and emotional expressiveness, and as we learned fromFerenczi, the behavioral activity may also lead to the experience and the memory.

In my view, we mistakenly polarize memory and enactment, inner experience and outerbehavior, intrapsychic dynamics and interpersonal interactions, as they are different aspects of asingular process. Even the distinction between declarative and procedural memory can be over-drawn. Freud’s cognitive style was to think in terms of binaries (Holt, 1989), paired oppositions.Holt, however, makes the case that Freud’s thinking tended to be much more complex andnuanced than these binaries might imply. Freud’s reliance on the reflex arc tended to polarizeideas and actions, the ideational and motor ends of the reflex arc. But we should not too readilyaccept this dichotomy, which is at the root of much mischief in psychoanalysis.

Freud himself had moments when he insightfully recognized that these were not dichotomousprocesses but rather that memory and behavior were equivalent, or rather transformations ofeach other. Hence in his essay, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” while oftenopposing remembering to repeating, ideas versus motor action, there are some moments whereFreud recognizes these as being different forms of memory, hence, “as long as the patient is inthe treatment he cannot escape from this compulsion to repeat; and in the end we understandthat this is his way of remembering [italics added]” (Freud, 1914, p. 150). Notice, that Freudhere does not say that he repeats as a way to avoid remembering but rather that repeating is hisway of remembering. This is a much less dichotomous formulation, one that views these mentalprocesses as transformations, dialectically constituting each other.

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The Torah presents the Ten Commandments twice. In one recitation it says, “Remember theSabbath,” and in the other it states, “Observe the Sabbath.” The rabbis ask, “Which one wasit?” And in a renowned response they say, “Observe and remember were stated in a single utter-ance.” “Shamor v’zachor b’dibbur echad.” I take this fundamental rabbinic principle, requiringand equating memory and enactment, as a critique of the polarization of inner and outer expe-rience, ideation and behavior, faith and the law, spirit and body, polarities historically dividedbetween Christianity and Judaism. Enactment and memory are two sides of the same coin. Whatwas Freud’s discovery of transference if not the detection of a new dimension of affect-ladenmemory, a memory lived out in relation to another, on the playground of the transference,before it can be remembered, formulated, or contextualized in words (Bohleber, 2007)? At itsbest, psychoanalysis does not contrast thoughts and actions, inner and outer, memory and motoraction, intrapsychic mental life and interpersonal external behavior as simple dichotomous termsbut rather views these as mutually defining transformations, different angles, views, or vertices(Bion, 1965) on a single complex reality. Conceived in this way, memory is not a static internalpicture but rather is continually constructed, embedded in our interpersonal context. It is livingmemory. “We meet. Therefore I am.” With you all, I look forward to further discussion that leadsto new thinking, to change, to growth, and to fond memories, maybe even to a bit of nostalgia.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Lewis Aron, Ph.D., is Director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy &Psychoanalysis. He was the founding President of the International Association for RelationalPsychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and is an Associate Editor and one of the founders ofPsychoanalytic Dialogues.

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