ABSTRACT

To illustrate the importance Sigmund Freud assigned to proper names, this chapter deals with the names that he as a father chose for his own children. Freud highlights a custom that is fairly widespread in some peoples, which concerns the taboo against pronouncing the name of a dead person. In Australia, the new name the boy receives when he is initiated into maturity is his most personal property. In the criss-crossing of the unconscious associative chains where the name is located, both forgetting and false-substitute remembering are generated, a true compromise formation between the forgetting motivated by resistance and the false memory pushed forward by the return of the repressed. Names, like day residues in the case of dreams, offer the unconscious something indispensable: the support necessary to transfer meaning that enables it to bypass censorship; a meaning that acquires density in its transgenerational meanderings, a vertical voyage that runs though the generations.