ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the place or absence of memory in organizational existence, an issue that involves all aspects of organizational life, from individual performance to organizational culture. Freud’s “art of memory” has been seen by sociologists as part of a broader cultural phenomenon of the twentieth century, which has been coined by Terdiman as a “memory crisis” which is still ongoing. This memory crisis was engendered by the cultural, social, and economic changes in the West beginning with the industrial revolution, which resulted in a radical rupture with the past in terms of traditions and the continuity of a way of life and a subsequent “loss of memory”. Freud as a thinker is, of course, the embodiment of the preoccupation with individual memory and is at the centre of the twentieth century’s “prolonged and intense fascination with the power of the past over the present”.
