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This excellent, cutting-edge article explores the controversy around the importance of the interpretation of the repressed, aired in previous IJP papers (Stern et al. 1998; Fonagy 1999). In so doing Andrade looks in detail at one of the most important issues in psychoanalytic thought and clinical practice today, that is, the debate around the nature of therapeutic action, and in particular the role and importance of the affective encounter in therapeutic change. Indeed Andrade describes it as ‘the most striking element of psychoanalysis in recent times, capable of altering its trajectory and dragging it out of its long and worrying period of stagnation’ (p. 678). With this I am entirely in agreement.
He understands cognitive development as ‘spontaneously blossoming from the affective nucleus’ (p. 677). If this is indeed the case, as I believe it to be, then the emphasis in the early stages of analysis must be on the affective encounter rather than the merely left-brained cognitive interpretational aspect of our work, at least in the case of those patients for whom early relational trauma marred the earliest stages of affective development. Andrade argues his case cogently basing the case for the new paradigm on the fact that earlier Freudian metapsychology [and one might add also Kleinian and Jungian metapsychology] was ‘necessarily limited by a lack of access to more recent scientific discoveries’ (p. 677, italics in original).
He begins his argument by establishing that emotional memory, that is the underlying emotional reactions that do not depend on conscious memory, is one aspect of implicit, rather than explicit, memory. Later in the paper he links these affective experiences to Freud's concept of ‘unconscious affective structure’ (p. 681, italics in original). He does not adopt a developmental stance at this point in the paper although it might have helped to bring in the early relational aspects of implicit memory and would have helped to clarify his argument.