A Special Sort of Forgetting: Negation in Freud and Augustine.

Abstract

The development from a positive, dualistic theory of memory and forgetting to a concept of memory that includes forgetting as a variety of remembering is traced in two thinkers. Freud's concept of repression is discussed as a complex negation of both remembering and forgetting, and the development of this construct is shown in his letters to Wilhelm Fliess. A close reading of Augustine of Hippo's Confessions shows a similar concept of a special sort of forgetting, in which what is forgotten is remembered nonetheless. Finally, the limits of the comparison are discussed, and a reading of Freud's "Negation" reveals ways in which the unconscious is fundamentally unlike Augustine's interiority.