Amnesias of a Freudian Kind

Part One

by Diane O’Donoghue, PhD

Abstract

Freud’s psychoanalytic project was indebted to mechanisms and effects that were made visible by acts of forgetting. Certain terms for that, such as repression, became dynamic constructions within his notions of unconscious functioning. But there is a notable example of a relevant concept, with currency in some later nineteenth-century scientific discourses, that seemingly remained purely descriptive for him: amnesia. This essay, the first of two parts, looks closely at the genealogy of Freud’s uses of amnesia in his early writings, arguing that its meanings, and functions, were more complex that might be readily apparent.

American Imago 78(1), 55-77, Spring 2021.

Link to Online Publication [fulltext can be requested from the library].

Part Two will be published in an upcoming issue of Imago later this year.

About the Author

Diane O’Donoghue, PhD, an art historian at Tufts University and Brown University’s Visiting Professor of Public Humanities, is also Director of the Program for Public Humanities at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts. She is an Affiliate Scholar and Faculty Member at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and currently chairs the Division of Interdisciplinary Psychoanalysis here. Her writings on topics related to the intersections of visual cultures and psychoanalysis have received the Loewenberg (formerly CORST), Deutsch, and Silberger Prizes. Professor O’Donoghue was a Fulbright Freud Scholar in Vienna and the Erikson Scholar at Austen Riggs, and received the 2019 Robert S. Liebert Award at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center, given annually to recognize interdisciplinary work in psychoanalysis and the humanities. The Liebert Award accompanied the publication of On Dangerous Ground: Freud’s Visual Cultures of the Unconscious (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).

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