Mnemics (memory); Traumatics (injury); Therapeutics (therapy); Haunted attics (haunted attics).
The first three (memory, injury, and therapy) first:
For Freud, a certain kind of forgetting is pathological; For Nietzsche, a certain kind of remembering.
For Freud, repression is an instance of forgetting that disrupts bodily processes; a dematerialization that leads to dystonic symptoms.
In Studies On Hysteria he writes
"intentional repression is...the basis for the conversion...total or partial, of the sum of excitation. The sum of excitation, being cut off from psychical association, finds its way all the more easily along the wrong path to a somatic innervation...the repressed idea takes its revenge...by becoming pathogenic" (pg. 102).
"the repressed idea would persist as a memory trace that is weak (has little intensity), while the affect that is torn from it would be used for a somatic innervation (that is, the excitation is 'converted'). It would seem, then, that it is precisely through its repression that the idea becomes the cause of morbid symptoms...becomes pathogenic" (pg. 251).
In Freudian psychoanalysis, the main cause of illness is when material and its forces are separated from it’s a/effects such as when a stimuli (Id, instinct, drive, thought, affect, feeling etc.) is denied by the 'subject' (superego censors the ego, ego censors the Id, Id overwhelms the ego or overstimulates the body, ego and superego conflict, etc.) and therefore becomes detached, decontextualized, displaced, and transformed into a symptom (the inside is projected outside, into an object, as in the bodily appendages in the hysteria case of Anna O., or the horse in the obsessional neurosis case of little Hans, a foot the object of displaced sexual fixation for the fetishist, etc.).
Following this line of thinking, that which is repressed is often that which is traumatic. The 'material-> force->a/effect' diagram would not be interrupted if not for its implications. As Wilfred Bion has shown, one destroys his or her associative links between body sensations, affects, feelings, and ideas, because the anticipated outcome of the possible associative chain is highly disturbing, or possibly dangerous (for those without good impulse control: 'anger = violence, so to prevent violence, I will eject anger, leading to schizophrenia).
We've been trained by decades of unrelenting humanist social worker cultural influence to think that trauma is an instance of a toxic external stimuli overwhelming or damaging a subject, but for Freud what constitutes trauma is not necessarily an external threat, but rather whatever is found overstimulating and intolerable arising from 'inside' and thereby ejected, blocked, etc. In this sense, trauma is an intense affect unable to be contained by the psychic apparatus. An overhwelming stimulus - whether form inside or out - unable to be processed and used by the 'inside' (relatively speaking) system. In all cases, trauma is libidinal excess - and even a lack, or a negative, such as a death, is an excess of absence.
In other words, thinking and feeling is traumatic to the body.
About two decades after his exploration of hysteria, this model of thought is put to use by Freud in Mourning and Melancholia to explore not hysteria, but what would now be called (somewhat incorrectly) depression. In experience-near language: if something makes me sad such as a loved one dying, and for whatever reason (perhaps my father told me to be a man, perhaps I feel that if I begin to cry I may never stop, etc.) I am not able to access and utilize my sadness and convert it into appropriate thought or action such as talking about sadness, ritualization, or crying, then sadness and the behavior or thought it intends to trigger become disconnected, and with this disconnection, melancholic affects become free-floating, freed up to attach to other thoughts, affects, and stimuli. Perhaps now something that I previously found cheerful now saddens me in a way not proportionate to the object, or perhaps I know feel a general sense of sadness without knowing why.
When material forces and e/affects are disconnected, and these kinds of 'pathological' rhythms are enforced, or when one experiences a trauma one is unconsciously attempting to process and master after the fact, one is prone to compulsively repeat the same conflicts. When one has no insight into what impersonal forces operate their body like a meat puppet, and one follows crystalized paths, one repeats the same, creates the same, etc. Put differently, when one cannot remember certain aspects of the past, and at the same time cannot forget certain aspects of the past (see Nolan's Memento, for example), one is certainly doomed to repeat the past forever; one's future is just the past. This is what Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle refers to as 'the repetition compulsion.'
This is in part why a (misused and misunderstood) goal of psychoanalysis is 'to make conscious what is unconscious,' with its method being to use language to connect instinct, impulse, affect, and thought.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, champions the position that to want to 'make more consciousness' is itself sickly and neurotic, and that one should aim to become less conscious, more intoxicated, and more in touch with instincts and impulses. In this sense, Nietzsche explicitly encourages a kind of 'forgetfulness' as both a way to return to instinct, but also remedy resentfulness.
The small, serious, resentful man worries too much about history, both personal and collective. He carries the weight of burdens that aren't his to bear - Christ's cross, a people's national history and its forced allegiance, the state's humanist spooks, etc. - and he feels obligated to bear them to the ugly end; to be guilty for a sin - cultural or theological - he did not commit, to be loyal to an abstract people composed of ancestors he never knew nor agreed with, to follow totems and taboos that don't serve him, etc. The small, sickly, serious man remembers all who have wronged him, or all those who wronged the people and places he's supposed to be loyal to, and he does not let these memories go, refuses to move on. He cannot forget. He feels eternally owed payment that is lost to time. The small, sickly, serious man is stuck in the past and thus he can neither experience the present nor forge the future.
To synthesize Nietzsche and Freud, Freud argues in Civilization and its Discontents that some repression of instincts and impulses is healthy to function in our everyday life, and additionally he has the concept of primal repression, where things that were never meant to be conscious are never recorded to begin with - they are repressed from the start. Both are a healthy repression, a healthy Nietzschean forgetting. I tell some of my patients 'we probably don't want or need to remember early memories of feeling in extreme danger, or even the many benign experiences that don't stay with us...'
Finally, as with Nietzsche, for Freud, part of the healing process of analysis is a forgetting that is not sickly like repression that opens up space for new thoughts and feelings, new 'object relations.' That is, old ossified unconscious cognitive, thought economizing tools - internal representations, predictive models constructed from aggregated experiences of personal history, etc., such as a 'cold mother' or 'harsh father' - these are broken down (analyzed), associated to new 'objects' (the analyst) and their associative networks loosened up. Instead of 'when A, then B, then C' the patient now has recourse to 'when A, perhaps B, C, D, or E, depending on X, Y, Z,' etc. Thoughts, affects, and behavior matrices are now complexified. In other words, stereotyping models are less rigid, more able to dynamically map the real, present moments (neurosis is after all a valuation of ghosts of the past over traces of the present).
To forget in a Nietzschean sense, to remember in a Freudian, and then forget and remember anew in both senses, are two sides of the same therapeutic coin. We must reconnect with our repressed past, but also forget that which we obsess over, that which we mourn, that which does not aid us.
Now - Haunted attics:
In the Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek argues that Marx discovered the Freudian symptom in that he, as I described above regarding Freud, shows that Capitalism through its mediating function of capital, exchange value, etc., disconnects the material from its effect/affect, thereby dematerializing the world, throwing things into disarray. Mark Fisher, who Zizek refers to as his friend (Ziz also writes a nice blurb on the back of Fisher's Capitalist Realism), reimagines Derrida's hauntology (which was in reference to Marx and Engels famous line about the specter of Capitalism), while Derrida's wife - a psychoanalyst - likens Derrida's hauntology to psychoanalysis in that the analyst excavates the analysand's past, dredges up old memories, phenomenon that linger long past the body that prompted it, i.e. ghosts.
This all a lot to say that Psychoanalysis and Marxism align in their materialist conceptualization of pathology. In this limited sense, psychoanalysis is a 'hauntology.' Following this, in a moment of Marxian structuralism, 'Haunt' etymologically breaks down into 'hant' or 'home;' Ghost, into geist, or spirit / soul. This means that the material house is the substructure or base material for the superstructure that is the spirit. To this effect, if a good ghost story has ever demonstrated anything it is that reality is much scarier than any ghost story. As several characters recount in Haunting of Hill House, 'a house is like a body, the pipes are veins, this room a heart, that one a stomach, etc...'
Not unlike The Shining - which Haunting of Blye / Hill clearly borrows much of its conceptualization of ghosts from - The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Blye Manor are stories about real trauma, human stories, family dramas that use 'ghosts' to communicate real but inarticulate, inexpressible horror (as horror is apt to do). Hill House is the better written of the series, but Blye Manor, in its simplicity, is a better account of the healing process of remembering and forgetting.
Without belaboring the point and giving too much away, in Blye Manor traumatic events of the past beget the telling of traumatic historical narratives, narratives which are told and retold, each time becoming more traumatic as the teller attempts to split off or deny (and denial is an explicit theme of the show) the trauma by covering up the negative emotions or events with wishful, overly-idealized, fantasies and dreams. Eventually some of the ghosts become aware - conscious - of their existence as a ghost through repeating the same memories until they desire a new outcome, a new point of growth for their narrative arc. At the same time, we the viewer learn of a ghost so mired in negation, and resentment, that it has completely forgotten its own narrative - why it haunts - and reverted to a brute mechanistic loop; that is, the ghost quite literally follows the same exact track, the same path, every night, each time fading away more and more from its original event that trapped it in the ghostly world
That is, some ghosts remember their trauma so that they may forget and move on, while others forget and continue to repress their trauma so that they compulsively repeat. What eventually heals the resentful ghost (thereby freeing all the other ghosts in the house) is when someone - a survivor of the ghastly house - is able to tell a new story about the haunted house, a story that turns the 'ghost story' into a 'love story.' This mirrors one of the scientific understandings of contemporary psychotherapy, that retelling a story - a narrative of the self - over and over in therapy to another who listens restructures the narrative and provides a healthy distance from the original traumatic events via language. That is, through therapy one gradually and implicitly learns to tell a neutral, then good story through internalizing the therapist, where one could previously only tell a bad story.
As a final caveat: the patients staying at the mental ward I work at would stay up late, playing with Ouija boards, claiming they saw or heard ghosts, say things move on their own, etc. Meanwhile, they're bones were hollowing out, their heart rates dangerously low, their skin torn up by razor blades, their throats eroded from vomiting, etc. Despite my bosses wish to take away the Ouija, I did not intervene. This was an escape for them, and a somewhat healthy one. This did not stop me, however, from quietly thinking 'the real horror is not the ghost, but what these people have been through, what traumas they've been subjected to, and the significance of their mental anguish.
The real horror is quite mundane...
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(for a related blogpost, see my exploration of hauntology and ghosts here)
