Neurosciences and Psychoanalysis

Ron Spielman (Australia) discussed the crucial role that memory plays in psychoanalytic practice. He emphasised the role played unconsciously by part-objects in pathological organisations, and refers to Stern's and Bowlby's work on how representations of past experiences actively influence present events.

He asked where in the brain these memories are located and how they are activated. His paper focused in particular on the speed of recovery of complex memories, as well as on the compartment of memory that exerts influence without conscious recall. He discussed the modern conceptions that have emerged as a result of neuro-scientific research, differentiating between ‘episodic’, ‘semantic’ and ‘procedural’ kinds of memory. For Spielman, ‘how to conduct or participate in a relationship would appear to require what are being called procedural memories’; that said, by way of contrast with conscious behaviours, in relationships with a variety of objects, any determinism imposed on us is largely unconscious.

Spielman suggested that, since our present knowledge is limited to the neuro-electric and neuro-chemical systems, electromagnetic frequency waves and quantum phenomena may play a part in the required speed and action in the present, as the clinical and empirical experience of psychoanalysis would seem to demand.

In the discussion, doubts were expressed as to whether greater knowledge of physics could further our understanding of the mysteries of the mind. Could such knowledge ever help us understand the contents of mental life? How are choices made when different threads of information lie simultaneously along the same communication path ways? How do they manage to work together? What makes some memories enter into resonance with others? How is meaning chosen? For the moment, we have no scientific data concerning this at our disposal. As Dr Kafka pointed out ‘to repeat is not to remember’.

A concluding remark, one of the questions raised and underlined by Solms, ‘What is