The Unpast

The Unpast: The Actual Unconscious, the principal text of this collection, was

the focus of the 2014 Congress of French-Speaking Psychoanalysts. Three

earlier texts show the progression of his thought which culminated in "The

Unpast". Scarfone's foreword to this volume begins in this way:

Time was a somewhat neglected theme in Freud's nearly fifty-year long study

of the unconscious, and he himself deplored this fact in one of his late works:

Again and again I have had the impression that we have made too little

theoretical use of [the] fact, established beyond any doubt, of the

unalterability by time of the repressed. This seems to offer an approach to

the most profound discoveries. Nor, unfortunately, have I myself made

any progress here. (1932)

One can only speculate about where a renewed effort on Freud's part would

have led him regarding the "unalterability by time of the repressed." In the

present series of essays, that idea is embraced again, though from a different

angle. Instead of subscribing to the general notion of "timelessness"

regarding the unconscious, I take stock of Freud's formulation in the citation

above. The "unalterability by time of the repressed" points at something

more dynamic or more dialectical than the blunt assertion that the

unconscious is timeless. Indeed, if the unconscious were timeless, one might

well wonder how any part of it could be brought into a time-bound form of

existence. Timelessness points to an unconscious that is out of this world,

whereas "the unalterability by time of the repressed," suggests a different

story: time does exist for the unconscious, but somehow the repressed is

protected from its corrosive effects. The question then becomes what makes

the repressed so sturdy?