—This is a guest post by Meg McAleer, a former historian in the Manuscript Division.
Sigmund Freud returned again and again to the problem of memory as he formulated his theories of psychoanalysis during the 1890s, as the Library’s significant collection of his papers show.
“What is essentially new about my theory,” Freud wrote in this letter to fellow physician and confidante Wilhelm Fliess, “is the thesis that memory is present not once but several times over, that it is laid down in various kinds of indications.” The second page of this letter sketches the progression of memory from perception (“W”) to the unconscious (“Ub (II)”) and eventually to consciousness (“Bew”).
Freud refined his theories over time in significant ways but remained committed to the notion that the past exerts a powerful influence over the present as memories embedded in the unconscious break through into consciousness through selective, altered and fluid remembering and forgetting.
Slipped into a pocket and kept close to the body, pocket notebooks are intimate, hidden and always accessible.
Freud purchased this small leather-bound notebook while vacationing in Florence in the waning summer of 1907. Its cover bears the Italian words “Ricordare è rivivere” (“to remember is to relive”). Freud owned many similar notebooks, filling them sequentially through the decades with jottings of names, addresses, expenses, ideas and observations.
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