Memory serves the pleasure principle, not trauma, and grounds all thinking

Evidence

The functional value of memory may be judged by the fact that it is for Freud the very source of conscious thought itself, the latter being “merely a detour from the memory of gratification … to the identical cathexis of the same memory, which is to be reached once more by the path of motor experiences.” On account of the diagnostic character of so much of Freud’s writings, we are tempted to think of memory chiefly in terms of pain, in terms of trauma, whereas in reality memory’s primary function is in the service of the pleasure principle. “The memory of gratification,” Marcuse tells us, “is at the origin of all thinking, and the impulse to recapture past gratification is the hidden driving power behind the process of thought.” — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 226

Categorization

• XREF: Runs against the common reduction of Freudian memory to trauma/PTSD — and against Benjamin’s ruin-focused recollection. Connects to the reader’s existing knowledge that pleasure-principle economics is Benjamin’s and Adorno’s shared backdrop. — connects to: Memory poetically completes the past self with a plenitude of being; Memory, fantasy, and perception all depend on the emotions — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 150; Radical attention is a mutual remembering that restores a thing’s innate loveliness (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Interest as pleasure-pain desire causes all thought and naming #expands (0.85) — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 482
• The compulsion power of one’s past derives from free choice, not its content #corroborates (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1194
• Memory poetically completes the past self with a plenitude of being #expands (0.75)
• Memory, fantasy, and perception all depend on the emotions #complicates (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 150
• Radical attention is a mutual remembering that restores a thing’s innate loveliness #complicates (0.70)