Epilogue

In recent decades psychoanalysis has increasingly embraced the embodied, implicit, and relational dimensions of developmental and therapeutic process. This experiential move foregrounds the manner by which meaning is co-created in psychotherapy – without losing sight of how episodes of the past reemerge in the process. The papers in this issue – remarkably diverse in their form and focus – display the robust inter-disciplinary potential of this new perspective. All speak to the notion of remembering in terms of its irreducible embodied and experiential dimensions: Whether it occurs during sleep, in the therapeutic dyad, in the genetic inheritance of our bodies, in our consideration of art and objects, or even in the characteristic stance of a whole epoque toward its shared past, remembering can be seen to take shape in experience, in an alive present, rather than in terms of inert representations.

We are left to wonder if these new views of remembering as embodied interpersonal action embedded in culture might suggest a revision of Freud’s famous adage that “hysterics suffer from reminiscences.” It may be that we don’t so much suffer from reminiscences as from the field effects that interfere with our capacity to remember together in ways that point to a good, shared future.

Whatever their implications, the rich contributions in this issue display the fruitfulness of an expanded picture of unconscious remembering – one that protects the present from being eclipsed by a looming deterministic past by making room for the role of the habitual body, the conversational other and the larger collective world.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Issue Editors

Daniel Goldin, Psy.D. serves as editor of the Psychoanalytic Inquiry and associate editor of Psychoanalysis: Self and Context. He has written numerous articles for Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalysis: Self and Context and Psychoanalytic Inquiry. His book Pragmati