Do recordar e do esquecer: a questão da memória em Agostinho, Nietzsche e Freud

This text aims at analyzing and emphasizing the astonishing coincidence of insights that characterize the theories of Augustine of Hippo, F. Nietzsche and S. Freud regarding the question of memory and forgetfulness. In these three thinkers, memory is not a faculty apt to reproduce, at our will, the images and impressions it would passively have received from outside or from our past experience. On the contrary, it is an active faculty where a dynamics of forces and relations of forces unfolds itself and which is responsible for the mechanisms of defense, parapraxes, and forgetfulness. Thus, forgetfulness is not an expression of simple chance, but rather a symptom of a resistance that overtakes the subject, in spite of the subject.