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Aristotle said that curiosity is the father of philosophy. Freud added that infantile sexual curiosity is the original impetus for the desire to explore the world. Bertram D. Lewin is a philosopher. He has the ability to be curious about phenomena that easily remain unnoticed. In his new book, The Image and the Past, one finds many beautiful examples of the originality of Lewin's thinking, of his ability to draw unexpected yet convincing conclusions from observations which, before him, were not scrutinized.
The book has a wide scope and deals with such diversified topics as the cave drawings of Lascaux, the meditation of Descartes, the psychology of philosophers, to mention just a few. The range of these topics shows not only the erudition of the author but also the fact that he was able to discover approaches applicable to many areas of mental life.
One of the main topics of the book is the search for the nature of memory. Because psychoanalysis is concerned with the impact of the past, the ways memory works represent a central problem. How far memory reaches back in the continuum of human life or even in the history of the human race is a question that has been asked by many psychoanalysts. Freud thought that castration anxiety is an inherited memory trace going back to the prehistory of the human race when castration was a reality imposed by the fathers on the sons during the competitive struggle for the female. Ferenczi went even further with his imaginative, though not very plausible, idea that in the sexual act a memory of the beginning of terrestrial life out of the sea is re-experienced. Fantastic as this idea may sound, since the discovery by modern biochemistry of the coded message inherent in RNA, DNA molecules which 'remember' what they are supposed to do to build the complex protein molecules, there seems to be some biological analogy here. However, the memory of the genes is too far away from what is in the orbit of the psychoanalyst's vision.