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Memory is the capacity to look from the present to the past and at the same time witness the passing of the present into the future.
H. J. Markowitz (1995, p. 767).
There are many kinds of memory. One is the memory for what you did last night. Other types of memory are for how to tie your shoes, or who William the Conqueror was, or how you felt when your grandmother died, or for remembering a seven-digit telephone number while dialling it. All of these are different still from the kind of memory you use when you go back to what you were doing before being interrupted by a telephone call. Memory is the umbrella rubric under which each of these diverse phenomena can be classified. What unites them under the term ‘memory’ is that all involve the neural representation of information to which a person was previously exposed and which can be reactivated for use in the present (Baddeley, 1995; Schachter, 1995; Shimamura, 1995; Tulving, 1995). Memory is closely allied with learning, whether learning facts, or learning relationships between events; ‘when I cry, mommy comes and picks me up’ (Alkon, 1992). Memory, then is about the past, but it also helps to anticipate the future. Neuroscientists generally agree that there are a number of kinds of memory, each processed in a different brain system (Schacter & Tulving, 1994). Typically these systems interact, but they can at times operate independently of one another.
The neuroscientific understanding of memory centres on issues related to the unconscious mind, and therefore ought to be of particular interest to psychoanalysts. Research findings support the analytic idea that unconscious material can affect conscious functioning. However, neuroscience does explain this phenomena differently from psychoanalysis, since neuroscience goes beyond the idea that unconscious material is the result of repression. I think the ideas of neuroscience are compatible with analytic approaches, but do challenge analysts to broaden thei