Forgetting of Forgetting

The "forgetting of the forgetting" is Lacan's deployment—via Heidegger—of a structure of double concealment internal to the subject's relation to its own constitutive lack. In the context of jacques-lacan-seminar-1, Lacan is distinguishing the ego as an imaginary function from the subject proper, and simultaneously reframing the superego and the unconscious as schisms within the symbolic order rather than tensions between instinctual forces. The "forgetting of the forgetting" names the deepest layer of this schism: the unconscious is not merely something forgotten (a first-order forgetting of experience, trauma, or desire), but the subject also forgets that it has forgotten—that is, it loses access to the very fact of its originary loss and alienation. This double concealment is what ordinarily constitutes the ego's imaginary self-sufficiency: the subject does not simply lack something, it is structurally unaware that it lacks.

Heideggerian "authenticity," as Lacan invokes it here, consists in the refusal to be absorbed by this second-order oblivion—to let the forgetting of forgetting close over the subject entirely. This resonates with the Lacanian clinical project: analytic work is precisely a disruption of the ego's imaginary closure, a reopening of the symbolic dimension in which the subject's constitutive lack can be assumed rather than denied. The concept thus sits at the intersection of alienation (the subject's structural dependence on the Other) and the symbolic integration of desire—the analysand's task is not to recover a lost content but to recognize that forgetting itself is foundational.

Within jacques-lacan-seminar-1, this concept functions as a Heideggerian inflection of Lacan's broader argument against ego psychology. Where ego psychology (as Lacan diagnoses it) treats the ego as an adaptive, self-transparent agency to be strengthened, the "forgetting of the forgetting" names the structural condition that makes the ego's imaginary self-sufficiency possible: the ego is not merely ignorant of the unconscious but is constituted by the concealment of that ignorance. This directly extends the concept of alienation: alienation establishes that the subject can only exist through a signifying chain that eclipses its being, and the forgetting of forgetting is precisely the phenomenological register of that eclipse — the subject does not experience itself as alienated because the very mechanism of alienation covers its own tracks.

The concept also articulates, in a different vocabulary, what the cross-referenced canonicals describe structurally. The ego (imaginary) is maintained through misrecognition (méconnaissance), which is exactly a forgetting-of-forgetting at the level of the mirror stage. Desire, structurally unfulfillable and constituted by lack, can only sustain its circling movement if the lost object's originary loss remains concealed — desire depends on not-remembering what was never had. The dialectical dimension (cross-ref: Dialectics) is also at stake: authentic analytic work is a dialectical disruption of the imaginary stasis produced by the double forgetting, reopening the subject to its symbolic constitution. The Name of the Father, as the anchoring point of the symbolic order and the law of desire, is what the forgetting of forgetting most fundamentally conceals — the subject "forgets" that its desire is always already structured by this symbolic debt.

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on TechniqueJacques Lacan · 1953 (p.196)

It is the forgetting of the forgetting. Heideggerian authenticity consists in not being engulfed by the forgetting of the forgetting.

The phrase "engulfed by the forgetting of the forgetting" is theoretically loaded because "engulfed" signals total absorption — the complete closure of the subject's imaginary surface over its constitutive lack — while the doubled structure of "forgetting of the forgetting" marks that this is not simple ignorance but a second-order concealment, the concealment of concealment itself, which is precisely what the Lacanian unconscious as symbolic schism (rather than mere repressed content) entails.