Day dream, screen memory, imaginative memory

Abstract

Improvement during psychoanalytic treatment produces a change in the relation with one‟s past; the capacity to remember emerges.
1) Phenomenology of remembrance.
a) It is a return into the past and not the reproduction of a past fact. A mathematical problem makes one recall the solution one learned at school; but in remembrance the schoolroom is there again, one‟s comrades, those autumn afternoons, the house by the
river where one lived... It is a wandering around, different from the sinking away into daydream and different also from the process of establishing the facts of memory.
b) It has a poetical atmosphere because of the modality of language in which this world of childhood discovers itself. Scientific language modalizes sense into an extrinsic relation between the signifying and the signified. Artistic language modalizes sense into
intrinsic relation of the signifying and the signified, creating a unity of signification. The world to which we-come back has this unity as it is our own world expressing a personal-unity of values.
c. It is given in a nostalgic feeling, which is not homesickness, the dread of being alone. Analogous to depression that inspires reparation, nostalgia recreates the past. It means a pain (algos) that makes return (nostos). It thus gives evidence of the capacity
to be alone, “which depends upon the presence of the good object in psychic reality so that the child can build up a belief in benign environment” (Winnicott). In imaginitive remembrance this environment comes back. “The images which bind man to the world are reanimated” (Bachelard).
II) The body is the organ of perception (Merleau-Ponty). Different body experiences constitute the various structures of imaginative experience: window, mirror, screen. Imaginative remembrance has a window structure. Through an actual perception 1
look back into the world of yore. The window frames the “horizon” (Husserl) of perceptive experience. Dreaming is a regression into the schizoid position of projective identification. Narcissus names this dissociation. The mirror breaks the intentional structure and the perceptive experience of the thing-object sinks into the dream with a symbol-object. Screen memory hides an unconscious phantasy. Repetition of the image maintains the repressing screen. Fixation, repetition and repression structure the screen.
III) Daydream as well as screen memory have their origin in unconscious phantasy. Freud compares both with the origin of myth. Myth has a “magic Now”, suppresses time. Returning interrupts repetition, history breaks open myth. The structures of imaginative experience express the different ways in which there is time: eternity-repetition-historicity.