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During one of the early debates of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society which dealt with a then famous book by Moebius,1 Freud observed that "the topic of memory is far from being exhausted… The whole problem of remembering and forgetting has not yet been dealt with, neither by myself nor by anyone else."2
Though these words, spoken in 1907, were not expressly stated during the proceedings to be reported, they may well serve as a useful point of departure, if not comparison, with regard to a consideration of the theoretical and clinical viewpoints set forth in the panel discussion. In fact, Charles Brenner mentioned in his introductory remarks that one of the purposes of this meeting was the clarification of our concepts of mental processes which are customarily subsumed under the terms of "memory," "remembering," "repression," and "forgetting." Brenner observed that practicing analysts in their daily work were usually more familiar or at least more concerned with the phenomenon of repression than with that of memory per se. He focused attention on what he called "mental memory or psychological memory" in contrast to various theories of memory as expounded in biological or biochemical studies and examined in experimental research projects of a prevailingly chemical nature. The analyst's interest in psychological memory processes is essentially based on the theoretical and clinical considerations derived from his daily work with patients.
In the first formal paper, entitled "The Theory of Repression," Charles Brenner presented a conceptualization of the theory of repression which, according to him, differed in some respects from the customary approach to the subject. He observed that from the early Freudian formulations—which