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Dr. DeLuca's extensive review of the confabulation literature and his own findings on the subject present us with an opportunity to briefly review psychoanalytic ideas about memory and attempt to find areas of complementary interest and dialogue.
Heretofore, psychoanalysis has not attempted a comprehensive study of memory in all its complexity as has been done in cognitive psychology. Issues such as the distribution of memory, short term versus long term, encoding, storage, retrieval, consolidation, priming, and types of memory such as implicit versus explicit, procedural versus declarative have not been at the forefront of psychoanalytic investigation. However, there has been some recent and perhaps burgeoning interest in memory types and their possible relevance to understanding transference and character traits. This last matter, though of great potential interest in regards to possibly refining our understanding of aspects of procedural and semantic memories, will not be discussed in this brief commentary.
The main focus of study for psychoanalysts in the area of memory has been autobiographical memory, that is to say, memory that in one way or another involves the self. Whereas most researchers studying this type of memory—often classified under explicit and/or declarative memory—have recognized the alterations and unreliability of such memories over time (Loftus, 1980), to my knowledge only psychoanalysts direct much attention to the specific nature and motivation for such distortions. In other words, distortions in the recollection of short-and long-term memories constitute an essential component of psychoanalytic work. This focus derives from a basic tenet of psychoanalytic theory—the pleasure-unpleasure principle—which is assumed to underlie the functioning of the mental apparatus. According to this principle, the organism strives at all times to minimize unpleasure (pain) and to (perhaps) maximize pleasure. Therefore, in memory functioning and specifically i