The function of anamnesis in Freudian psychoanalysis and its philosophical resonances

Abstract: The relationship between knowledge and anamnesis has been analyzed since the beginnings of philosophy through Plato’s work, as a dialectic between thing and idea, between time and eternity. In modernity, the very concept of analysis underwent a transformation. Starting with Kant, it no longer designated the horizontal operation of separating what is already united, but rather the vertical origin of synthesis itself, a transcendental synthesis that would lead to the hypothesis of the unconscious. Beginning with the temporal opposition between perception – whose time is oriented toward the future – and anamnesis – whose time is directed toward the past – Freud demonstrated that psychoanalytic experience is not limited to a simple reconstruction of a history, but rather involves thematizing its own origin, designated as “pre-historical”, namely in the sense of Lacan’s “personal myth of the neurotic”. Revisiting the case of Emma from A Project for a Scientific Psychology provides a clinical verification of this new architectonic perspective. Freud demonstrates that anamnesis is merely the occasion for a certain conversion of the arrow of time, meant to highlight the point around which this conversion itself takes place, redefined as consciousness, and, ultimately, the “zenithal” point of its own rotation, which is the unconscious.