You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Upon reviewing her case material, the author concludes that the analyst's memory is very different from the frequent cartoon caricature of the analyst taking notes. The memory does not depend on notes, but as Freud commented, it arouses incredulity along with surprise. It is dangerous if the analyst abuses it for seduction or domination in a fantasized fusion through hypermnesia that submerges the patient in the analyst's omnipotence. The analyst's interventions, in a simplified scheme, could be regarded as a phallic representation, and the analyst's memory as a maternal bosom, attentive and anticipatory. But this bosom could become a prison if the analyst's memory is infallible.
Daymas-Lugassy illustrates the latter notion with a clinical example of a patient whom she had originally seen as a young child, and who returned for analysis as a young adult. This patient had the fantasy that the analyst retained total memory of his earlier treatment, for which he himself had no memory at all. For this patient the analyst's memory seemed to be an auxiliary ego for his childhood self and a guarantor of truth. Thus she emphasized not exact memory per se, but generative or creative remembering in construction of the myth that constituted his treatment.