ABSTRACT
The title of Anna Freud’s paper “Die endliche und die unendliche psychoanalyse” is translated literally into French as “Analysis with end and analysis without end”. The vocabulary Freud used certainly did not come from a dead language, and it is well known that he preferred words in everyday use to scholarly designations. Freud did not go any further into the negative aspect of the unconscious that he adumbrated in that extract, particularly when he stated that this second phase of the fantasy “has never had a real existence”. For psychoanalytic thinking, the work of remembering is not simply going back in time, it is also a progression through mental space and a forcing of the internal frontiers that provide reminiscences with a sanctuary against forgetting and the pain which that involves. The relationship between psychoanalytic thinking and the concept of memory is one of elective affinity.
