Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

January 13, 1970. PSYCHOANALYTIC SIGNIFICANCE OF EXPERIMENTAL DATA RELATED TO CONFLICT AND FORGETTING. Ernest Kafka, M.D.

Dr. Kafka described an experiment he devised to investigate the microscopic changes that take place in the mental apparatus, especially in relation to memory, forgetting, and repression. Experimental subjects, who were paid, sketched and titled ten images which they conceived as a situation similar to the analytic situation. Electrodes were attached to the subject's body in order to make physiologic observations. An experimenter, out of visual range, asked the subject to recall the titles of his pictures and to describe them; verbatim associations were recorded and notes were made of things that were forgotten. A record of the galvanic skin response (GSR) was kept for two hours; categories were in terms of high and low, activity variability associated with forgetting, open conflict, conflicting themes, paraforgetting, lowered level of consciousness, and degree of relation to the experimental environment. The data were then examined in clusters of coincident phenomena and to determine the relationship of clusters. Nineteen of the twenty-one subjects forgot at least one image. High GSR images were different from all other images as they were associated with the experimental environment; low GSR images, both remembered and forgotten, were not so associated. The question raised is: Are forgotten images with their associated thoughts psychically important to the subject, and what similarities in form and content do forgotten and conflicted images display? While one expects to find significant form or content similarities between the forgotten and conflicted images, and associations to them, the author stated that unusually high variable GSR and forgotten images shared the same theme in a significant majority of subjects. The data indicated that forgetting recent mental events is part of a complex adaptational process which tends to re-esta