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Neuroscience makes it increasingly clear that nonconscious brain mechanisms influence conscious perception, memory, and behavior. From the psychoanalytic perspective, however, a significant gap remains in our understanding of how these neural processes result in the motivated defense mechanisms of a dynamic unconscious. This book, based on presentations given at a conference sponsored by Harvard University in 1997, narrows the gap. It deals with some rather complicated neuroscientific concepts but is well worth the effort it takes to read.
The volume's central assumption is that what we recall is organized to be consistent with our beliefs, and the beliefs we form may be shaped by our memory of past events. This is so because memory is an active constructive process: What we recall is not what we actually experienced, but rather a reconstruction of what we experienced that is consistent with our current goals and knowledge about the world. If we remember something often enough, we will likely believe it to be true and real. A brief summary of three chapters will convey a sense of how this book addresses its subject.
In their chapter, Johnson and Raye emphasize that source monitoring can regularly lead to memory distortion. Source monitoring is a determination about the accuracy of recall and whether a memory is the result of personal experience—of one's having seen it, read or heard about it, or simply imagined it. Source information is not encoded with