In a rare illustration of the synthesis of art and science, Peter Blos, the celebrated psychoanalyst, has a character ask, “Is memory not the trusted archivist of all events that marked your life?” The inquiry appears as part of a poetic dialogue, “Unicorn Park,” the lead piece of his recently privately-published collection of poems, Imago Mundi. The Socratic reply: “No, no—it was not / as memory tells you. / It was more or it was less / than memory knows. / Memory is what lies / between what happened / and what is remembered.”
This poetic fragment encapsulates a good part of our knowledge of the organization of memories.
Memories are records of experiences, not simply of events. Experiences and events are not the same things. Experiences are complex products of stimuli and shaping structures—stimuli introduced by events on the one hand and shaping structures that chronicle and transform them into psychological products on the other. Shaping structures include but are not limited to dispositional orientations, preferred perceptual modalities, intrapsychic and interpersonal conflicts, adaptive strategies, and the style and availability of progressive hierarchical organizations. At times these structures may deliver well-defined, highly discrete entries; but those are exceptional times. Consequently, when psychoanalysts investigate memories, they recognize that their task is the examination of the archivist as well as the events that were recorded.
All this is expressed eloquently in Blos's poetic imagery. Yet, despite this advance in our knowledge, there still remains some tendency among clinicians to equate experiences and events with one another, thereby tenaciously clinging to the notion that memories can be unimpeachable links to the past.
In part that notion derives from ways in which the history of psychoanalysis has been comprehended and applied.
When the discipline was first born, memories were declared to be faithful records of the past. In the 1890s Freud culled out the hidden reminiscences of seductions that he believed were at the roots of hysterical disorders. Reading his works of that period today, it is evident how much his own convictions led him to coax and suggest at least as much as he culled. The “recalled” memories were unrecognized conspiracies between physician and patient.
After the turn of the century, Freud's thinking was dominated by a somewhat analogous framework as he shifted to his study of instincts. In that period, he hypothesized that pathogenic infantile fantasies were reposed in the unconscious. In treatment they were to be accessed through interpretation; their recall would effect the cure.
For Freud in both of these phases, the child's mind was conceptualized more or less as a passive recipient of traumatizing events or equally disruptive instincts. In effect, everyone was set up to suffer from posttraumatic stress disorders.
Clinical research led to radical revisions, but, as the years rolled forward, a few representatives of burgeoning psychoanalytic schools perpetuated that original fundamental framework failing. There were some Kleinians, for example, who resolved to recover the records of an early “paranoid and depressive position,” the residues of inherent unconscious fantasies. There were Jungians who strove to convince patients that archaic heritages were reposed in their minds—events that antedated their birth influenced their conduct. And a few Kohutians and self psychologists focused on recovering the chronicles of insufficiently empathic mothers.
Clinicians who practice within such a framework are sometimes more interested in validating what they already believe to be true than in coming upon new discoveries. They justify their approach by noting that such validating invariably helps patients feel better. An approach that yields such apparently worthy outcomes cannot entirely by condemned simply because of its methodological limitations.
But why do people feel better when memories (or fantasies or “positions” or historical records) are consensually endorsed within a therapeutic milieu?
The value of verifying memories or of helping patients create them lies chiefly in the closing of the circle of coherence and extending the line of historical continuity. Such unwitting therapeutic conspiracies permit patients to overcome the feelings of desperation or confusion that have plagued them. They blanket their anxieties about ambiguities with a sense of certainty and their feelings of impotence with a sense of power. Helplessness is converted into victimhood, victimhood into assertiveness, and assertiveness into fury. That procession traces one of the oldest forms of therapeutic action.
Relief notwithstanding, the problem with such a tilted explanatory perspective is that it fails to do justice to the shaping structures that convert events into experiences.
Minds are active synthesizers and organizers, not merely passive receptors. Consequently, the recording of events is always influenced by a host of components of mind. To add to the complexities, those components grow and develop in a sequence that is facilitated or encumbered by the surround, while guided by an inherent maturational program. To validate a memory in the service of therapeutic relief often bypasses the recognition that memory lies “between what happened and what is remembered.” Invariably, such validation compromises the overall goals of the psychoanalytic enterprise, i.e., to chart and comprehend the influence of the shaping structures, as well as the past and present surround.
While individuals may derive benefits from that kind of approach, the generalizations drawn from such conspiracies can prove dangerous for at least four reasons. First, they divert therapists from engaging what might turn out to be more fundamental determinants of disorders—the limited or failing shaping structures, for example. Secondly, by encouraging the particular adaptive strategy of victimhood and fury, clinicians may move patients away from more felicitous ones. Thirdly, the relief may prove temporary or lead into more incapacitating disorders. And, finally, even inadvertent conspiracies can violate the innocent.
Memories are like any other psychological products. They are useful for investigating normal and abnormal human development, and they range from more or less faithful records to frank delusions. When therapists conspire to buttress one of these poles or the other, they are certain to interfere with delivering more valuable offerings.
This article is reprinted from the spring 1995 issue of Treatment Today, where it was published through the efforts of the Public Information Committee of The American. Complimentary copies of that issue were sent to all members of The American. Reprinted by permission of Treatment Today, P.O. Box 803244, Dallas, TX 75380–3244 (214–880–4715).
Samuel Abrams, M.D., is a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute at NYU.