Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. XVIII, 1990: The Assets of the Mentally Handicapped: The Interplay of Mentall Illness and Creativity. F. Fromm-Reichmann. Edited and introduced by A.-L. S. Silver. Pp. 47-72.

Silver provides an edited and condensed transcript of some lectures given by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann at the Washington School of Psychiatry in 1950. Childhood experiences are kept from awareness for any of several reasons, including attempts to glorify the past to compensate for present suffering; to avoid blaming the parents; and to obscure the compensatory mistreatment of one's own children. Childhood amnesia also stems from "the fact that one can only remember events in the modality in which they first appeared," an idea she attributes to Kurt Goldstein. In psychotherapy, the "schematization and conventionalization" that characterizes adult experience is made partly unbearable, which makes it possible to recover memories of some childhood events, which may be the source not only of the patient's illness, but also of certain creative powers developed to evade anxiety. Fromm-Reichmann gives examples from self-reports of mental illness by Clifford Beers, Anton Boison, and an anonymous nineteenth century autobiography entitled The Philosophy of Insanity. She distinguishes, in nontechnical terms, the experience of dealing with manic-depressive and schizophrenic people. The former do not experience