Reply to Michael Good

Dear Editors,

Thank you to Michael Good for his careful reading of my paper and his thoughtful comments regarding the ‘analytic fate of screen memories’ in the psychoanalysis of traumatized patients. He is correct that I do not specifically address the presence of screen memories in the analysis of Julie which he views as a ‘case report [that] points toward … the fading of screen memories during a properly conducted analysis.’ I do not disagree with Good's assessment, which is quite possibly true from one perspective, but my emphasis was from a different vertex that involved the intersubjective play between the mind of the patient and analyst in creating meaning in statu nascendi.

Michael Good accurately states that ‘the analysis did not lead to a central focus on memories or reconstruction of sexual trauma.’ Julie initially lacked the capacity to think, dream and, therefore, historicize her traumatic experiences at the outset of our analytic venture. She was filled with ‘undigested facts’ (Bion, 1962) rather than memories, concretely experienced resonances that could not be thought about through secondary process thinking, but rather expelled through projective identification as an inchoate form of thinking. I hoped that Julie and I could become a ‘thinking couple’ (Bion, 1963) who could collaboratively process her inner world of frightening concrete presences through our interactive reveries. Julie was able through that exchange to have ‘memories’ and I was less concerned with the veridicality of these putative ‘memories’ to actual history than with the development of her ability to think.

Bion (1962; see also Ferro, 2002) distinguishes between the apparatus for thinking and the thoughts which that apparatus thinks, both of which undergo evolution that I believe was illustrated in my discussion of Julie's analysis. There was considerable growth in her capacity to think that evolved from a reliance on projec-tive identification to her ability to integrate her traumati