How do Contemporary Psychoanalysts Treat the Past?

Joseph Lichtenberg began by explaining the panel's format: the panelists—Glen Gabbard, Darlene Bregman Ehrenberg, and Alexandra Harrison—would each present their theoretical orientation for five minutes, followed by a discussion among the panelists, the chair, and reporter Melvin Bornstein. Then each of the three panelists would present a clinical example for ten minutes, followed by further discussion. Lichtenberg noted that dealing with the past was central to psychoanalysis in many of its early concepts, ranging from the releasing of strangulated affect, to freeing memory from repression, to reconstructing traumatic events. Gradually, with advances in psychoanalytic understanding, the conviction that bringing the past into full consciousness is a major means of obtaining therapeutic effect has faded in the minds of several groups within the analytic world. Many analysts now emphasize working primarily in the present, including the present moment, and conceptualizing the past only as it exists in the present. Other analysts focus on unformulated experience, others on dissociation. A further conceptual shift places the analyst as co-constructor or co-creator of whatever view of the past emerges, rather than as neutral interpreter of the past. Lichtenberg set the panel a number of questions: Is the past to be discovered layer by layer, as in Freud's archaeological metaphor? How much do we picture memories of the past to be subject to drive distortion? How much of the analyst's view of the patient's past is drawn from the analyst's reveries? Is working with model scenes a useful way to explore the past? How does the analyst's own past, sometimes similar, sometimes quite different, play a part in the analytic work with the patient's past?

In describing his theoretical orientation to working with the past, Gabbard stated that he views theory as a helpful metaphor, but limited in its ability to explain and direct. Rather than being guided by a theory, he listens to mater