ABSTRACT

The Nolan brothers’ movie Memento exemplifies one way in which to understand the concept of logical time in Lacan’s teaching. In this chapter, the authors approach the question of self-creation in a psychotic subject in relation to the remembering and forgetting of past history. In the movie Memento, the male protagonist, Leonard Shelby, subjectifies his past and chooses to remember it only in a certain way. Memento is a great way to understand the constant dilemma of a psychotic subject, who relentlessly invents and employs a construction to compensate for the failure of the paternal metaphor in the Symbolic order to have taken place much earlier in life. In truth, his only real “memento” is the memory of a traumatic scene, that of his wife’s death, which occurred a few years prior to the present time of the movie. In Memento, the film-makers’ aim was to show that the facts the people base our lives around are not always true.