ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the central role of memory in psychic development and its serving as the registrar of states of disequilibrium from the vantage of the organism doing the experiencing. Using Kandel’s pioneering neuroscientific work into memory and Freud’s insights into its function, we explore how memory relates to subjectivity and an organism’s perspective driven by its polymorphous sensory nature, and how aversive experiences are encoded in the interests of evolution as Darwin understood it. But in the human psyche, this preservative function often becomes both self- and other-harming and appears to violate the evolutionary imperative of preservation and procreativity. Narcissism is discussed as a positive and essential feature of underpinning the Markov blanket that all systems require to sustain and survive, and its links to the development of ‘ego’ as a binding layer preventing entropy.
