ABSTRACT
Regret is ineluctably intertwined with and attached to memories. It reverberates over time. Understanding regret requires delving into memory at a level beyond mainstream psychology’s trivializing it as a brain-trace. Sigmund Freud’s discovery of “screen memories” privileges the relationship between retention and its “psychical significance”, and also simultaneously destroys the notion that memory is an objectified trace or “connected chain of events”. Freud interprets his patient’s screen memory as rooted in a genuine ambivalently experienced situation. Significantly, Freud finds that the phantasies comprising the so-called childhood memory belong to situations happening much later. Fredrick Nietzsche, who links the matter of memory to health and happiness, teaches that people must cultivate the capacity to forget. To explicate the meaning of time as subjectivity, Martin Heidegger utilizes E. Husserl’s phenomenological concept of intentionality. Screen memories reveal the possibility of remembering the “wrong” things precisely to hold at bay the “right” ones, exactly those that hurt most.
