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Dr Covington's article is a most thoughtful treatment of how memory can function, in unconscious repetition of the past, as a profound defence in analytic treatment. The author contrasts the thinking of Freud, Jung and Janet on the subject. She illustrates with clinical material how three patients repeated in the analysis their habitual, early defences. These were seen as ego defences, incorporated into the personality as part of a false identity, an unconscious memory of how frustration in traumatic early relationships was avoided. Through the experience of togetherness in the present relationship with the analyst, the patients became able to assimilate the past into conscious memory, and so distinguish the past from present reality.
The author begins with a discussion of the importance of memory in establishing an individual's distinct personal identity. It provides the framework from within which we define ourselves in relation to the external world, and the narrative, the personal history in which we are agents of our fate. Without memory of the past as past, we lose location in time. Past and present converge, we are locked into the past by habitual behaviour, unconscious memory.
Freud's theory was that the repression of ‘bad’ memories is the basis of neuroses - that bad memories need to be assimilated by the ego to open the way to the present. This is contrasted with Jung's view that living the past in the present is a defence against present reality. Jung thought that the presence of an ego is necessary to contain conscious memories. With the development of a strong enough ego, the memory of events can be recovered consciously because of the internal ‘togetherness’ which makes them thinkable. Without this togetherness the ego cannot assimilate the memories, which retreat into the unconscious. It was their work with hysterics which had made both Freud and Jung aware of the presence of an unconscious within which certain memory images were active and yet which ha