On: Dream actors in the theatre of memory: Their role in the psychoanalytic process

Dear Sirs,

I wish to commend Mauro Mancia (2003) for his insightful discussion, in which he differentiates between implicit and explicit memory systems in terms of rememberability. However, I believe that there might be a misunderstanding based upon his assertion—correct though it is in a technical sense—that, unlike explicit memories, implicit memories are not retrievable ‘as such’. It therefore may seem to those IJP readers who are relatively uninitiated in the perspectives of neuropsychoanalysis that what is implicit memory is much harder to identify as a memory, even though the author also importantly points out that the signature on the psyche of implicit memories is nevertheless available via their entry into dream imagery, transference, and the like.

What the reader might wish to keep in mind is that rememberability is not as important as the ability to elicit implicit (or other) memories via priming, and then to reconstruct memory from the results. As an example, let us consider the author's work with his patient. Mancia reports that the patient's mother was deeply depressed prior to the patient's birth and extending long into his childhood. The patient presented with a significant depression and continually verbalized his sexualized transference wishes toward his analyst. Such transferences were first interpreted