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This paper, which honors Hans Loewald, takes as its theme the topic of memory and imagination, as an elaboration of one of the themes that was central to his work. Psychic structure, with the exception of an individual suffering extreme trauma, is generally a configuration with a slow rate of change. Even so, change is intrinsic to our lives and is not only built into the life cycle, but is also the product of everyday experience. Were the capacity for psychological change not preexisting, no amount of therapy could bring it about.
There are several different modalities in the treatment situation through which change takes place. However, this paper explores what are referred to technically as autobiographical (or declarative) memories, on the one hand, and imagination and fantasy, on the other, and the joint roles they play in initiating change. Both memory and imagination are potentially important change agents. Although I discuss them separately, they necessarily interact. It is not my intent to privilege memory and imagination over other therapeutic priorities, such as making the unconscious conscious, conflict resolution, dream interpretation, or transference and countertransference, but rather to highlight an additional string that is at play in the therapeutic encounter. In conjunction with declarative memory and imagination, I also touch on procedural memory insofar as the experiences of our earliest years are key to understanding some of our affective/ emotional proclivities. But, of necessity, we can explore procedural memory only through reconstruction, not through the recall of conscious memory.