The Unpast - Dominique Scarfone

nThe Unpast: The Actual Unconscious, the principal text of this collection, wasn nthe focus of the 2014 Congress of French-Speaking Psychoanalysts. Threen nearlier texts show the progression of his thought which culminated in Then nUnpast. Scarfone's foreword to this volume begins in this way: n n nn nTime was a somewhat neglected theme in Freud's nearly fifty-year long studyn nof the unconscious, and he himself deplored this fact in one of his late works: n n nn nAgain and again I have had the impression that we have made too littlen ntheoretical use of [the] fact, established beyond any doubt, of then nunalterability by time of the repressed. This seems to offer an approach ton nthe most profound discoveries. Nor, unfortunately, have I myself maden nany progress here. (1932)n n nn nOne can only speculate about where a renewed effort on Freud's part wouldn nhave led him regarding the unalterability by time of the repressed. In then npresent series of essays, that idea is embraced again, though from a differentn nangle. Instead of subscribing to the general notion of timelessnessn nregarding the unconscious, I take stock of Freud's formulation in the citationn nabove. The unalterability by time of the repressed points at somethingn nmore dynamic or more dialectical than the blunt assertion that then nunconscious is timeless. Indeed, if the unconscious were timeless, one mightn nwell wonder how any part of it could be brought into a time-bound form ofn nexistence. Timelessness points to an unconscious that is out of this world, n nwhereas the unalterability by time of the repressed, suggests a differentn nstory: time does exist for the unconscious, but somehow the repressed isn nprotected from its corrosive effects. The question then becomes what makesn nthe repressed so sturdy?n