The little heap of magnesium powder

The patient’s history has always been a central part of psychoanalysis. Freud wrote several case histories where he illustrated his psychoanalytic understanding of the clinical material. In 1937, Freud wrote: “What we are in search of is a picture of the patient’s forgotten years that shall be alike, trustworthy and in all respects, complete” (p. 258). To achieve this goal, Freud emphasized the rôle of the repressed memory, childhood experiences, free association, analysis of dreams and so on. How can we understand this search for a “complete picture” that Freud promotes? Did Freud expect us to try and find some facts in the patient’s history that could explain the present illness with the past context, and try to make a coherent, chronological story of the patient’s life, or is it possible to understand Freud’s concept of a “complete picture” in a different way? If Freud in 1937 meant that it was possible to construct a complete picture of the patient’s life, he seemed to argue for the opposite in other works. The case history of Dora is called Fragment of a case of hysteria (Freud, 1905). What we get there is not a coherent picture, but something that is fragmented and unfinished. He mentions two reasons for the incompleteness of the case history. The first reason was that the analysis was prematurely broken off. The second reason, and the most important one here, is connected to the psychological material: “. the material which elucidated the case was grouped around two dreams” (p. 10). Thus, in this case, the central part of the case history was not based on historical facts but on two dreams. Given this context, in psychoanalysis, one does not primarily search for facts but for unconscious images in the patient’s history. This emphasis on unconscious images seems similar to that which Andersson (2014) writes about the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. In the article Salvaging images, Andersson states that: “. Benjamin suggests that we turn to images in order to understand our history” (p. 1). I think this is what Freud does in the case of Dora. Laplanche (1992) says that what Freud is aiming at is not to find a complete picture of a life history or a complete biography. “His ‘historical’ bravura piece is entitled ‘From the history of an infantile neurosis’” (p. 434). It is not the chronological history Freud is looking for; it is the infantile or the subjective experience of the child. According to Laplanche (1992), what Freud is searching for is a history of the unconscious. This seems to parallel what Andersson writes: “Essential to his [Benjamin] theory of remembrance is therefore his interest in and ventures into a rich world of images, childhood images, dream images ( . ). History decays into images, not into stories” (p. 1). As I understand Andersson, Benjamin thinks that underneath the linear story or narrative, we find a stock of images. This underworld of images is not characterized by linearity. According to Lessing (1992), stories or narratives have a linear structure. Stories and narratives are connected to temporality. Pictures and images are not connected to a chronology or linearity, but to space and spatiality. In Freud’s notion of the unconscious, there is no temporality, only space, and the images Benjamin discovers in his childhood are not structured by chronology or linearity. Andersson writes: “(.) different from the one rooted in the idea of life’s linearity and historical progress. This new form is characterized by breaks, detours, repetitions, stammering and hesitation” (p. 10). When Laplanche (1992) writes about the history of the unconscious, he describes a history with discontinuities. The point seems to be that if we follow the logic of linear history and reality, we tend to overlook and ignore the unconscious images of childhood. We need to think with spatial metaphores. “We miss the meaning of childhood if we consider it a stage in a linear and progressive process. For Benjamin, childhood stands vertically into every phase of life” (Andersson, 2014, p. 2). According to Feldman (2009), the history of the unconscious lives inside us. The unconscious history is embodied in our