Introducing Freud: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides)

by Oscar Zárate

1. Hysterics suffer from painful, unpleasant memories of a traumatic nature (trauma, Greek for ‘wound’). 2. Traumatic memories are pathogenic, disease-creating. This was a revolutionary anti-mechanist notion which implied that a psychical (strictly mental) agent directly influences the physical processes of the body. 3. Traumatic memories do not ‘wear away’ normally but remain an active and unconscious force motivating behaviour. (What cannot be remembered cannot be left behind.) 4. Banishment of painful, emotionally-charged memories from consciousness requires an active repressing mechanism operating at an unconscious level of mental life.