ABSTRACT
The ground broken by Freud and Breuer’s pronouncement, in the ‘Preliminary Communication’ concerning the psychogenesis of hysteria, that ‘[h]ysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’ (Freud and Breuer 1991: 58) brought to view the tangled roots linking the developing concept of a hidden and powerful unconscious with nineteenth century anxieties concerning memory’s absence and excess. Freud’s later emphasis upon fantasy, rather than memory, in his revised writings on hysteria’s aetiology can be regarded, in part, as the vanquishing of memory’s unbiddability by fantasy’s origins in unconscious wishes and anxieties. The latter are formations, whose origins analysis roots firmly in the subject, rather than in memory’s complex relation to external events.
