Proust understood the evocative power of memory. In Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel visits his mother, who serves him tea and pastries known as petites madeleines. As Marcel dips a madeleine into the tea and puts it in his mouth, he is overcome by an unexpected emotion. “Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?” he wonders. “I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours.”
Suddenly, the source of the memory reveals itself to him:
The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me…. But when from a long-distant past … after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised for a long time … and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
Proust's contemporary, Sigmund Freud, also understood the power of memory. Though he stressed the importance of specific childhood events and memories — or repression of those memories — in the development of various types of psychopathology, Freud also presaged another type of memory now known as implicit memory. His “stereotype plates” were patterns based on early experiences that are indelibly etched upon the brain and repeatedly invoked as models for interaction with others. Transference, Freud recognized, is a distinctive form of “remembrance of relationships past,” albeit one colored by inner fantasy and distorted by unconscious forces.
Within the transference relationship, representation of self and other, linked by affects, are reawakened and worked through. Though this model of the mind has made sense to psychodynamic clinicians for decades, we are now in a position to speculate about the neural mechanisms that underlie the memory system responsible for transference. Transference most likely arises as the result of a memory system known as implicit or procedural memory.
In contrast to explicit memories — the remembrance of specific madeleines past — procedures for how to relate to others are encoded in the same way that other skills, such as learning to ride a bike, are acquired. Procedural memory encodes how to do something, whereas explicit memory is memory for specific events or facts.
There are several important implications of understanding transference as a form of procedural memory.
First, if our models of how to have relationships are encoded in procedural terms, it is possible that they operate outside conscious awareness in a passive fashion. Our ways of doing things, including having relationships, are frequently opaque. I am not very good at telling you how to ride a bicycle; I've learned to do it through practice, and you will have to learn it through practice, too. This may explain why patients remember and enact past relationships through actions that they do not consciously understand.
Second, neuroscientists now know that implicit memories are encoded directly in the cerebral cortex through slow, incremental changes in the strength of connections between the cortical neurons. Learning a procedure takes time because these shifts in neuron connections occur slowly; not many people learn to ride a bike in one try. These slow shifts may explain why changing the representations of self and other takes time in psychoanalysis. But slow changes make sense if the goal is to create an average prototype. Allowing any one example to skew the representations radically messes up the representation.
In contrast, in order to form an explicit memory for a specific event, a hippocampal memory trace is formed and is then gradually transferred to the cortex for long-term storage. Such hippocampal memory traces are often laid down in one trial. Thus, if you eat a madeleine dipped in tea today, you are likely to remember what it tastes like the next time you are offered one, which may not be for quite a while.
The difference between implicit and explicit memory was colorfully demonstrated to memory researchers by a patient whose hippocampus was removed to treat his intractable seizure disorder. After the surgery, the patient could not store new experiences and facts. For example,
he was never be able to remember his doctor's names for more than a few minutes. But even with this impairment in episodic memory, his implicit memory was intact. He learned to copy a figure by looking at its reflection in a mirror as well and as quickly as do people without hippocampal damage. But every day when his experimenters asked if he had ever seen the mirror drawing task before, he said no.
Procedural memory is very prominent and robust in young children. Explicit memory does not begin until age 2½ or 3, because certain parts of the hippocampus have not finished developing. Thus, procedural memory is all the young child has. Infants are born knowing procedures that we call reflexes, such as sucking. In early life they are primed to encode other procedures — such as how to breastfeed — because procedural memory uses those parts of their brains that are up and running. We can speculate about whether analysts often emphasize process over content as a result of their understanding that they are trying to change procedures rather than specific ideas.
Knowledge of such facts about brain development can inform psychoanalytic theory. Freud termed the lack of memories about events from the first three years of life “infantile amnesia” and hypothesized that these early memories were repressed. In light of what we now know about hippocampal development, the concept of infantile amnesia no longer makes sense. Memories for specific events in the first three years of life are not repressed; they are simply not encoded.
Susan Vaughan, M.D., is a recent graduate of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and the author of “The Talking Cure: The Science Behind Psychotherapy.”
But Freud was correct in believing that early life events were crucial. It is during these “first three years” — currently being rediscovered by brain researchers and Hillary Clinton — that we encode the basic rules for how to have relationships. Every interaction with caregivers helps form representations of the procedures for relationships and creates an average expectable prototype of ourselves and others.
Winnicott's notion of the “good enough” mother conveys the kind of averaging of experience that brain researchers are focusing on as they study implicit memory. As psychoanalysts increasingly embrace neighboring fields, the stage is set for fruitful cross-pollination, and analysts can inform neuroscientists as well. When neuroscientists study the memories that light the corners of Marcel's mind, they may overlook the fact that his wonderfully evocative memories of madeleines were created in Aunt Leonie's bedroom.