ABSTRACT
Every person who is sufficiently educated to recognize that there is such a discipline as psychoanalysis knows that its practice is held to unlock the influence of the past over the individual’s awareness and functioning in the present. Psychoanalysis does indeed amplify and radicalize the famous 1905 aphorism from George Santayana’s The Life of Reason: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” However, aside from the vindication of this aphorism on the level of the individual’s life-history (combined with the commonplace, but exceedingly cryptic, claim that the healing process of psychoanalysis is either powered by, or results in, the expansion of recollection and remembrance), there is a wealth of confusion about the way in which psychoanalysis discovers new dimensions and ways of addressing personal history. Indeed, given the nature of the unconscious as a perpetual returning of the repressed, the role of awareness on the path of liberation from the vicissitudes of our personal histories becomes yet more challenging to contemplate.
