Memory and its Vicissitudes

About

According to Freud, memory (along with length of life, life after death, and paternity) is one of the chief subjects upon which all mankind are uncertain. He wrote that ‘we are all in the habit of believing [in memory], without having the slightest guarantee of its trustworthiness.’ 
 
Yet one of the lessons of psychoanalysis is that our sense of self is both shaped and undermined by our memories, and this perspective has been enormously influential. For example, in 1927 Virginia Woolf suggested that we can think of our internal world as ‘a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends…lightly stitched together by a single thread’ and that ‘Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.’
 
This conference will consider psychoanalytic perspectives on the significance of memory and explore the role that remembering plays in transformation and growth through detailed clinical presentations.   

 The Clinical Seminars

Evening Clinical Seminars

Friday 28 November, 18.00 – 19.45 (GMT)

Locations: Senate House and online

Clinical Seminar Leaders include Rachel Chaplin, Christine English, Marcus Evans, Peter Fonagy, Shirley Hiscock, Daniel Pick, David Taylor, and Heather Wood

Short Contributions

Short Contributions

The Conference Delegate Pack will include synopses of a selection of the thought-provoking work you send us, which for reasons of space or thematic continuity cannot be included in the programme. Often these come from younger contributors and/or contributors from other disciplines – although equally, they may be established and well-known to us all. We benefit greatly from both categories.
 
If you have a project, or a contribution relevant to the significance of memory in psychoanalysis, please write to us by Tuesday 30 September 2025 at events.psychoanalysis@ucl.ac.uk enclosing a brief contribution (500-1,000 words). Include a biographical paragraph and selected references if applicable.

Image Credit: Photo by Intricate Explorer on Unsplash