memory. I already likened the idea to a vehicle leaving grooves on a dirt track by its passage. The inadequacies of such an account of memory are numerous. (The brain is not clay, so what could these imprints, each somehow resembling the force that made it, possibly be?). In the Project, Freud had offered something more plausible, saying that “memory is represented by the differences in the facilitations” (Freud, 1950: 300), i.e., by the resistances between the elements of the system (individual neurones) being facilitated to different degrees. But this still makes very little sense, because we have to assume that the resistances in the “virgin” state are everywhere equal (otherwise our memories would be inbuilt or innate) and, that being the case, there is no reason why a travelling excitation should facilitate the resistances to different degrees by choosing one path through the system rather than another.
Ambiguity in terms of reference – nervous system or mental apparatus – is as much a feature of the Project as of Beyond. So, at the start of the Project, the “elements” between which facilitation occurs are neurones, but a few pages later Freud starts to write, without any explanation, about facilitations between mental images in a description of what he calls the “experience of satisfaction” and this description comes with an account of memory, which is completely at odds with that given earlier in terms of facilitation difference. Freud considers the infant sucking on its mother’s breast and says that the experience leaves behind two memories, one of the satisfying external object and another of the reflex movement made by the infant (sucking on the breast), which brought the satisfaction. The latter memory is originally “information of discharge”, which Freud defines thus:
The information of the reflex discharge comes about because every movement, through its subsidiary results, becomes the occasion for fresh sensory excitations, (from the skin and muscles) which give rise to a motor[kinaesthetic] image.
(1950: 318)
Freud then writes that: