Fixation as Form

Elisabeth Müllner

“[…] The most important as well as the strangest characteristic of psychical fixation is that all impressions are preserved, not only in the same form in which they were first received, but also in all the forms which they have adopted in their further developments. This is a state of affairs which cannot be illustrated by comparison with another sphere. Theoretically every earlier state of the mnemic content could thus be restored to memory again, even if its elements have long ago exchanged all their original connections for more recent ones.”1

Fixation does not mean holding, chaining, the immutability of a meaning or an object. Impressions are preserved in the same form, Freud writes. What happens when an impression is preserved? In his essay Screen Memories, Freud also uses the word Erinnerungsspur [memory trace] for impression2, which already brings a hint that it is not about a concrete content, not about meaning. I would like to draw attention to the fact that Freud states that the impression is preserved in the same form - it is the form which is impressed. It is not a question of what is imprinted, but how it is imprinted ‒ in a form. What is meant by form? The second sentence of this quotation can be read as an interpretation of the first. The former state of the mnemic content can be restored to the memory. It is not content that is restored, but a state. A state as it is known in chemistry, for example: liquid, gaseous, solid. Transferred to psychic processes, I read state as the form in which the libidinal quality of the impression manifests itself. The content is lost or replaced, but the state, the expression of the libido that is attached to it, survives and endures. However, not in exclusivity. The fixation of an impression is not a tightly laced corset but has the capacity to take on further forms. This train of thought of the – simultaneously – permanent and the changeable will be further elaborated by Freud in ”3 A Note on the “Mystic Writing Pad on the one hand, but on the other hand he will modify it by defining fixation as the place for writing – Lacan's letter.

References

1 Freud S. Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in J. Strachey (trans.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. VI, Hogarth press, 1901, p. 275, footnote.

2 Freud S. Screen Memories, ,in J, Strachey (trans.), The Standard Edition, Vol. III, Hogarth press, 1899, p. 320.

3 Cf. Freud S. A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad, in J, Strachey (trans.) The Standard Edition, Vol. XIX, Hogarth press, 1925.