Memory, pain and resignification

Abstract

This paper intends to rely on fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis in order to articulate memory and resentment, the theme studied by the Multisubject Institutional Study Group of the University of Passo Fundo – nicknamed “The rats” – in 2004. Initially dedicated to the study of the novel “The rats”, by Dyonélio Machado, and to the construction of parallels with Freud’s “The Rat Man”, the group, fusing psychoanalysis, literature and history, committed to the problem of memory and its resignification. The reference points adopted were “The smell of living things” (O cheiro de coisa viva), Dyonélio Machado’s memoirs, and his novel “The madman of Cati”(O louco do Cati). In this text, we propose that the demand to write and talk, narrate one’s memories and real or fantasized events is connected to the possibility to recreate what was once experienced and to change it, tackle the traces left in the soul, yielding effects of meaning. Memory is not found ready, with clear and historically contextualized recollections. The fragments of the marks left by the experienced lived – scars, traces and vestiges – are living flesh: they come back and impose themselves as an urgency that forces the individual to exert psychological work on them, surround them with words and attribute meaning to them, turning them into memory and feeling.