Why do we need to forget?

Notes from a lecture in Bela Rechka, 24.05.2008, at Goat Milk Festival by Elisabeth Vykoukal, Sigmund Freud University, Vienna…

Why do we need to forget?

We have to find new ways to come together; we live in a time where there are no more bells to call us to meet.

The essence of life – we can only live in a moment. Being alive means to have a past and a future and to be just in between.

We need an ability to remember in order to constitute our personality.

When we lose memory, our life falls apart, we don’t know who we are any more. It might happen because of the damage of the brain, accident, traumatic experience.

Our story goes on as long as we live. A complete story can be said when we are dead.
We know and don’t know at the same moment.

In the ancient Greece, everyone who dies, goes to Hades – it was possible to get it only by crossing the river of forgetting. Dead person has nothing to remember.

Nietzsche said that it is human to forget. We have to forget many facts that we are ashamed of, afraid of, or when we did something evil.

Freud considered that our brain contains everything what we experience in life. There are traces of what we have experienced in our brain – we can prove it now.

We have to live with our forgetting.

Freud asked: Why do we need to forget?

This question has opened a new window for experience and science for dealing with a human life.
Psychoanalysis  gave a tool to deal with our forgetting.

It was not an accident that Freud came to this conclusion, it happened through treatment of his clients. He discovered how the memory works. He considered that the neurotic clients suffer from the memories – they can’t express them, but they live them.

The case of Anna O. - to clean her memories, she felt that she had to share them with somebody.
Psychoanalysis works on memories.

There are periods in life when we need to forget. We have to forget, because we are not strong enough to deal with our experiences and memories.

In our early childhood, we have to learn a lot in a very short period – we start getting contact with different persons, we have to find our place in the family and we are not always treated carefully. Many people suffer a lot in this period. The best mother/father are not able to understand everything. Children have to cope with an experience of loneliness.

Kids forget very quickly. In fact, they seem to forget very quickly. This experience of pain, loneliness is repressed in a very early childhood. It live on it our unconsciousness. It can live until the moment that we are ready to cope with it.

One strategy to survive is not to think about what has given us pain – on the other hand we can not forget, it stays in our unconsciousness and lead us to strange actions.

Psychoanalysis says that we do forget, because we have so strong emotions that we can’t cope with them. We need somebody else to tell our story, we can’t live alone as human beings, we need other people.

Psychoanalysis was developed as a therapy for individuals, but it can be used to understand what is going on in the society – we as individuals constitute a community. Psychoanalysis was developed when there was a concentration on an individual, not at a groups.

What was experienced in Vienna in the XIX century?

There was a search for feeling of belonging. Everybody has to create their life on their own – we couldn’t take a profession form our parents. It is a very personal struggling.

The idea was to see in the psychotherapy, where the communication between the individuals can be improved.

If people are strong enough to express themselves, the wishes of the world they want to live in – things may change and improve.

We don’t live fully our life, because we don’t contribute enough to the world.

We need someone to tell our personal story and to say about the place where we live.

We live now in the world where so many people move from one country to the another. Feelings of loneliness and not belonging is becoming more and more in this world. Many people don’t know where their home is – one way to find it is to share memories, to share their stories.

The project in Bela Rechka: We have to find a new way to come together; we live in the time where there are no more bells to call us to meet.

We change with an every person we meet. We should follow our inner compass.

It’s difficult to express our feelings, not only  bad ones, but also  good ones – it is very difficult to show that we love somebody. We are often left alone in the groups that we function in.

We have to find a new home for us.
We can not take it for granted that there is a place for us.