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Newell Fischer's brief note on a time-limited psychotherapy with an eighty-year-old patient—a man suffering from a recurrent nightmare for over a decade—is intriguing given the many interesting questions it raises. In fact, it can serve almost as a Rorschach card, offering as it does inroads for exploration of whatever areas of interest a reader might have. Just as Fischer has a clear interest in preverbal memory, reconstruction, and trauma that guides his thought here, so my interest in conflict theory, development, pathogenesis, and mutative action will inform my comments. That they differ from the author's conclusions should not be taken as a criticism. Rather, I am using his clearly interesting and apparently helpful treatment as an opportunity to comment on long-held interests of mine. From that perspective, my comments are meant to be heuristic and to highlight views from a different theoretical perspective.
In essence, Fischer suggests that the patient's interesting nightmare reflects a pre-representational memory of cumulative trauma suffered during his breast feeding experiences. Clinical theories of trauma such as this one carry an implicit formulation different from more Freudian theories of trauma (see, e.g., Busch 2005; Sugarman 2008). “Clinical models formulated on this basis assume that real object relationships are stored in non-declarative implicit memory as ‘implicit’ or ‘procedural’ memories … or ‘implicit memory-objects’” (Bohleber 2007, p. 334). Such a model of pathogenesis carries with it the implicit notion of two qualitatively