You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
A case is reported of a six-year-old boy who manifested a remarkable memory for small details of situations which had been highly emotionalized in his infancy; so much so that he was constantly distressed by meeting such a detail as a purely adventitious element in later experience. This failure in selective forgetting came to the fore during treatment. Desperate crying over stories or pictures connected with babies was a feature of his symptomatology. At one stage he showed catatonia-like states of excitement around the pictures, alternating with a listless stuporous condition. He seemed deliberately to seek out the sweeping excitations inherent in the pictures and the activities which they induced in him to ward off a threatened dissolution of the boundaries of the self. Desperate crying had been an element—which the parents had tried to prevent—in two passively perceived experiences of his first year; one a painful prolonged bodily state, the other prolonged feeding difficulties. In treatment he mimicked and excitedly fed a crying 'picture baby'. The feeding was not meant to assuage the baby's crying, but expressed a reactivated memory entity in which 'crying-baby-pain-feeding' were irreversibly connected. The baby activities corresponded to a quest for restitution in terms of the primary process and its mechanisms, and enabled him to relegate his crying to an image with whom he playfully identified. His unstructured ego could neither modulate its affects nor function in the secondary process by selective perception, selective recall, and selective forgetting. The chronic distress connected with the enduring character of the early painful experiences had defeated the functioning of repression. The irreversible nature of his composite memory patterns prevented the development of a capacity for abstraction, and his extraordinary memory was an inexpedient substitute for the ego's ability to execute repression.