The Transformation of Past Experiences

The fact that experiences within the analytic relationship, in real time, can alter affective memories of the past should be a cause for wonder. This essay is an attempt to focus in greater detail on this still somewhat mysterious process. I do not present any new clinical observations, but rather discuss familiar aspects of the psychoanalytic process from a somewhat different perspective, a perspective that has been influenced by Gerald Edelman's (1987, 1989, 1992), contribution.

Psychoanalysis has long been viewed as a method through which an individual could be relieved of the burdens of the past. We know that the compulsion to re-create, painful past experiences in current time is a major source of neurotic suffering. Of course, nothing can change what objectively happened in the past; what can be changed is the affective component that the patient carries within as living history (Loewald, 1980). Such transformations are the antithesis of an involuntary repetition of the past. The intersection between the present and the past in psychoanalysis is mediated through the transference, which selectively activates specific aspects of old relationships so that the past is experienced in the present. We know that these memories of the past may be admixed with fantasy. But inasmuch as I intend to explore the interface between psychoanalysis and neurobiology, I focus on memory and assume a traumatic model of psychopathology-that past experiences are actual. For the purposes of this presentation, I bracket the important subject of fantasy, for an exploration of fantasy will take us too far afield.

Frank Bidart, the poet, has spoken of the tragedy of untransformed givens, and we all know what beginning psychoanalysts soon recognize-that there are limits to what can be transformed by means of psychoanalytic treatment. In 1896 when Freud was still viewing neuroses as traumatic in origin, he observed that psychopathology represents, at bottom, a failure of the retranscription o