Forgetting and remembering are inseparable.

Because of that very inseparability, those who seek most to remember what most calls out to be remembered must learn first to give forgetfulness its full due.

I will try to explain in what follows.

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The fact that remembering must pay respect to forgetfulness is evident in even the most common efforts to remember something. If, for instance, I recall someone who was once a good friend, but whom I have not seen in years, I may recall my friend’s face, voice, and demeanor in detail, but yet be unable to remember his name. It is right on the tip of my tongue, but the harder I try to remember the name, the further it seems to slip away from me. Finally, I give up trying to remember my old friend’s name, and turn to other matters. Then, while I am occupied with something that at least seems to be unrelated to my previous friendship, the name I so vainly tried to remember suddenly occurs to me.

To vary the same example a bit: after striving so vainly to remember my friend’s name by concentrating all my mental effort on trying to remember, I drift off into recollections of experiences I once shared with him, and in the process suddenly recall his name clearly.

Such examples show the close connection between remembering and forgetting. A third example, from a completely different context, will serve to clarify this relationship further. The example is the phenomenon that psychoanalysts call “repression.” It is precisely such repressed experiences, according to Freud himself,  that — though blocked from ever being consciously experienced when they occur — determine the neurotic behavior of a given patient.

Psychoanalytic therapy consists largely in helping just such patients to “remember” — in a unique sense of that word, since as repressed the experience was never “membered,” as it were, in the first place, so the prefix ‘re-’ in this case is used in its purely emphatic sense, and not in the sense of ‘again’ — the traumatizing events they have repressed.   Furthermore, the remembering invoked in such cases is an arduous business that the therapist cannot accomplish for the patient, and which must be approached obliquely.

The therapist cannot, for instance, “cure” neurotic patients who happen to be male by telling them some such thing as, “As a child, you wanted to make love to your mother, but were frustrated by the fear that your father would castrate you if you did.” Rather, through using such techniques as free word-association or the interpretation of dreams, the therapist hopes to get the patient to allow his thoughts to wander freely enough to escape the mechanism of repression, and to experience the disclosure of the repressed experience that engendered the neurotic behavior. The hope is that through such disclosure — and through whatever interpretations the therapist might suggest of what is so disclosed — the patient will finally be brought to address what he had repressed.

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Just as repressed events, precisely because they are repressed, seem to dominate neurotic experience, in general that which is forgotten often holds sway over experience. Indeed, the more completely an event is forgotten, the more rigidly can what is forgotten control thought and behavior.

In this very way forgetting preserves that which has been forgotten. It is from that preserve that it must be drawn, if it is ever to be remembered. Just as repressed material cannot be forced into the patient’s consciousness, but must instead be carefully elicited in and through the patient’s own therapy-primed thoughts, so in general can that which is forgotten be remembered only by letting go of one’s thoughts, so that they can drift back into the stronghold of forgetfulness itself. Indeed, just as the eliciting of repressed material is no easy task, so does letting thinking in general drift back into forgetfulness require practice and finesse. The example of repression bears further consideration in that regard.

As already mentioned, repressed materials, just insofar as they are repressed, dominate neurotic behavior. That is, the never yet experienced and always already “forgotten,” which is to say  repressed, events collect and give pattern to the neurotic individual’s activities, feelings, habits, and interpersonal relationships. In compulsively repeating themselves in that guise, they insistently demand to be membered, which is to say collected, at last.

In sum, all of what it is most important for us to come to know can only come to us by being conjured out of clouds of forgottenness and called, for the very first time, into memory.