SIGMUND FREUD
For Freud, Memory is the foundation of the development of the individual psyche, even if this can occur both ‘normally’ as well as in pathological (unhealthy) ways. He believed that people ‘repress’ painful memories deep into their unconscious mind. Freud argued that the act of repression did not take place within a person’s consciousness. Thus, people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories of traumatic experiences, and these repressed memories continue to function in the unconscious as the represses motivations of actions and are manifested in pathological symptoms; as in cases of hysteria. Some individuals, as a result of repressing the memory of specific traumatic events either fail to progress through the ‘normal’ stages of infantile psycho-sexual development becoming fixed in, or regressing to these stages results in neurotic behaviours – fetishes and obsessions.
Freud believed human memory expresses or reveals the dual ‘magical’ capacity of our mental apparatus for unlimited receptivity and the preservation of durable traces, though deformed. The psychic system which receives sense impressions from the outside world remains unmarked by these impressions which pass through to a deeper layer where they are recorded as unconscious memory.
