A Psychoanalytic View of Memory in the Light of Recent Cognitive and Neuroscience Research

In this paper I will be addressing two questions on memory within the context of psychoanalytic theory and practice while drawing upon recent research from cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and some of our own research on unconscious processes:

1. Is it possible to distinguish veridical from constructed or false memories?

2. What role does consciousness play in memory formation and retrieval?

I will first briefly discuss the role of memory in psychoanalytic theory, and then consider each of the two questions in the light of current memory research that Tulving, Squire, and Schacter and Loftus, among others, have so fruitfully explored. Then I will offer quite tentatively a different view of memory.

It is a well known story that Freud originally believed that hysterical symptoms were caused by childhood sexual abuse. He presented a series of cases to his medical colleagues in which he felt he had identified this early traumatic cause in a series of cases. An actual experience, repressed because of its traumatic nature at some point, caused a variety of neurotic symptoms. Once the traumatic memory was recovered the symptoms disappeared. A brief case illustration of this is found in The Studies on Hysteria (1895). While on vacation and having just sat down to rest after a climb, Freud was approached by a young woman who had learned that he was a doctor. She desired his help with symptoms that constituted in

Freud's mind a state of anxiety in which she experienced shortness of breath caused, she felt, by the sensation of something crushing her chest. In the course of a brief conversation, the young woman, Katharina, recalled several instances of sexual abuse some years before at the hands of her father. Following the recall of the abuse her anxiety symptoms abated.

This early account answers the two questions unambiguously: the veridical recall of an actual experience resulted in a cure. The memory was conscio