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Memory – a Pharmacon

Summary/Abstract: This essay examines the pathologies of Polish memory through Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytical theory. Bielik-Robson suggests that the majority of what is seen as historical memory in contemporary Poland is no memory at all but a compulsion to repeat, reminiscent of the dark ritual of an ever-returning trauma. It is of course risky to extrapolate from psychoanalytical methods to collective subjects, but this essay attempts to describe the assumptive subject of the Polish collective as a Kleinian ‘angry infant’ in the paranoid-schizoid position. This arrested development results in a falsely passive experience of dependency as well as a complete inability to work through trauma. To develop this ability, however, turns out to be a necessary condition for the formation of memory in the strict sense.

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