ABSTRACT
Modernist aesthetics in the 1920s frequently invoke the processes of remembering and forgetting. This is apparent in the exhortations to wipe away traces of a previous epoch or previous styles. In polemical form, typically, avant-garde groups propose the negation of all that has gone before. Also common is the seemingly contradictory impulsion to invoke ‘primitivist’ or ‘naive’ prototypes, regarded as a more authentic mode of being and accessible to our own archaic memory, once the civilisational carapace has been stripped away. Such concerns about negation, memory and forgetting, and layers of the self and psyche are explored in Freud’s essays of the 1920s.
