6 - ‘Now I'm the monster’: Remembering, Repeating and Working Through in Dead Man's Shoes and TwentyFourSeven

Summary

We must be prepared to find, therefore, that the patient, yields to the compulsion to repeat, which now replaces the impulsion to remember …

Sigmund Freud (1914 [2000]: 151)

Freud's essay ‘Remembering, repeating and working through’ appears remarkably early on in his conception of the compulsion to repeat, an idea that would come to obsess him for the rest of his life and that would find ultimate expression in the latter chapters of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. ‘Remembering, repeating and working through’, as M. Guy Thompson tells us, is arguably the most dense of all his technical papers; in a few short pages it manages to dismiss the technique of hypnosis, assert the importance of transference, explore the relationship between memory and repression and suggest ways that encysted trauma can be worked through in analysis – a concept that was to pave the way for the psychoanalytic talking cure itself (Thompson 1995: 192). In some ways, this small paper represents the point of rupture between the hypnotherapy of the late nineteenth century and the psychotherapy of the Freudian era.

At its heart, Freud's paper concerns itself with the relationship between memory and psychological pain, and so too, I would assert, do films like Dead Man's Shoes and Twenty Four Seven.