Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering (review)

Abstract

624 Biography 22.4 (Fall 1999) Jeffrey Prager. Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. 261 pp. ISBN 0-674-56641-6, $35.00. Memory and its uncertainties seems to be a central concern of the millennial period. At the level of whole societies, repression of the past is countered by a pressure towards documenting and disinterring, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa being the most dramatic, watershed example of this tendency. In that particular instance, it looks as though the drive to memorialize has established new conditions for the relationship between witnessing and political progress, although it is also clear that notions of truth continue to be savaged by expedience and selfprotection . Remembering trauma is of critical concern, perhaps reflecting a social impulse towards cleansing or excusing. The enormous energy currently expended on collecting Holocaust (Shoah) testimonies is driven by a sense that it is the precious direct testimony of survivors which must be preserved; yet the ambiguities surrounding this project and the complex relationship between testimony and "historical record" is never far away. Evidence for this is given, for example, by the furor surrounding the revelation that Binjamin Wilkomirski's searing memoir of his childhood experiences, Fragments, was a work of his imagination, either deliberately or accidentally (see Lappin). The question surrounding that particular example of misremembering is whether Wilkomirski's absence from the scene of his own memory reduces the value of his remarkable book, and if so, as what? To what degree does the fact (or not) of an occurrence affect the validity of the memory? As psychoanalysis vividly testifies, remembering is not necessarily something easy for individuals or collectives to manage. As Adam Phillips comments, "People come for psychoanalytic treatment because they are remembering in a way that does not free them to forget" (22). He also comes to the heart of a set of important matters with the further point that "We use memories to forget with" (24). That is, many memories are "screen memories" for other things, for desires or for worse trauma. It is not simply that horrible things are forgotten; often they are replaced by something else. Much of the time, this suits us better than the alternative, remembering the horrible. After all, why should we put ourselves and our neighbors through it, in pursuit of some moral imperative of truth at all costs? Unfortunately for peace and quiet, forgetting and misremembering does not always work (we do not know the frequencies, of course—perhaps it works most of the time, perhaps it never does). If the repressed keeps returning, the forgotten keeps bouncing back, then memorializing at an individual—that is, psychotherapeutic—or social level is needed: remembering in order to forget. The Shoah demands memory because it cannot be laid to Reviews 625 rest; there are too many ghosts. In the lives of individuals traumatized in other ways, there are great gaps, inexplicable hardships; something, it seems, must be at their source. If nothing obvious can be found, it must be lurking inside, misremembered or repressed, awaiting retrieval so that a life's story can be forced to make sense. Many of the issues here—about "truth" and fiction, forgetting and recalling, whether lives are coherent narratives and why people seem to want them to be so—have come together over some time in the related debates concerning the "good faith" of psychoanalysis and the reality or otherwise of memories of (sexual) abuse "recovered" during therapy. Can an experience of something as powerful as being sexually abused be forgotten, and if so, can it then be recovered during the process of therapy, without that recovery being a further kind of "abuse," arising out of a kind of collusive process between therapist and patient in which memories are constructed in the light of political, social, and personal ideologies? If remembrances of traumas past are thought of as fantasies, is this a way of consolidating the abuse of a victim, and hence is not just a failure of nerve on the therapist's part, but a process of revictimization that calls into question the good faith of therapy in general? How separate...