The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.
rememberquotes
But though he could not recapture it, he could remember it, as one remembers a vivid experience at some period of one’s life when one was in effect a different person.
1984 / experience / remember
It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.