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Working out the biological basis of categorization in the real world is precisely one of the main goals of Edelman . Edelman’s ideas are of interest not only because of his focus on processes of self-organization which provide the organism with the required adaptive potential, but because he considers memory from an embodied perspective. The notion of “memory as recategorization” is based on processes of sensory–motor coordination which in a very direct sense anchor memory, or its manifestation in behavior, in the interaction of an individual with the environment.

We want to pick up two central ideas of Edelman here, sensory–motor coordination and value systems. The general framework proposed by Edelman suggests that the results of motor activity are an integral part of categorization. “While sensation and perhaps certain aspects of perception can proceed without a contribution of the motor apparatus, perceptual categorization depends upon the interplay between local cortical sensory maps and local motor maps. The strongest consequence of this assumption is that categorization cannot be a property of one small portion of the nervous system” . Thus, categorization involves not only the brain but also the sensory–motor apparatus, a key implication of the principles of sensory–motor coordination. The essential mechanism of categorization in Edelman’s framework is a parallel sampling of the environment by multiple sensory maps within the same modality and between different modalities. This sampling is a process of sensory–motor coordination in which various maps pick up different, but temporally correlated, signals from the environment. These correlations play a fundamental role in categorization . Edelman illustrates the principle of sensory–motor coordination as shown in Fig. 2.

Thelen and Smith point out that “this perfect temporal association of multimodal information is perhaps the only perceptual invariant that spans all ages, contexts and modalities. We believe, with Edelman, that this correlation is the primary link between the mind and the world.” This is a central point in embodied memory theory: sensory–motor coordination structures the high-dimensional sensory space by inducing regularities. The temporal correlation of signals in the neural maps related to the different sensory modalities, generated by the interaction with an object, is the most basic example of such regularities.Which of these patterns of correlations are chosen or selected in the process of categorization is modulated by a value system. Value systems are basic evolutionary adaptations that define broad behavioral goals of an organism. For example, if an organism succeeds in grasping an object or sticking it into its mouth, a value signal is generated that enables the association of the activation in the neural maps corresponding to the different sensory and proprioceptive modalities. In this way the organism is capable of generating categories on its own as it interacts with the environment. To take our example again: Peter learns to differentiate between apples and newspapers by picking up apples and newspapers and sticking them into his mouth. The two sequences of events lead to different activations in the different neural maps which are then, via the modulation of the value system, associated with each other. If a new situation affords this, a new category has to be developed. Because there is no limit to the patterns of sensory stimulation, new perceptual categories can be formed.

A third important aspect of the methodology of embodied cognitive science is the developmental perspective. When conceptualizing memory processes, embodied cognitive scientists do not primarily attempt to directly model the internal processes of memory. The goal of their modeling is to define the developmental and learning processes and to explain the current behavior as resulting from these processes as the individual matures and interacts with the real world. The advantage of this perspective for modeling memory processes is that fewer assumptions have to be made about internal representations. Moreover, in this way, we are forced to work out the underlying mechanisms that eventually–during development– lead to the observed behavior. Much of the work in embodied cognitive science is based on a developmental perspective. For instance, constructing robots means implementing their “memory” as self-learning systems. This means that the robots change their knowledge and “memory” automatically by interacting with the environment. As already mentioned, unlike when analyzing living organisms, the researcher is able to “look into the robot’s brain” and observe the continuous changing of its neural network interacting with its environment. In other words, the researcher can study with great precision the influence of the developmental or learning history of the robot on his internal representation (neural network).According to the findings of this kind of research, memory has therefore to be understood as a product of developmental processes in constant change (see below).

This perspective is compatible with psychoanalytic theorizing, where the developmental view is one of the underlying principles.

As described above , the analyst tried to understand the present behavior of Mr. X in connection with his biography, his idiosyncratic development. The “objective” information from Mr. X´s mother, that her baby son had suffered from an unbearable bodily state and that she had not been able to comfort him for 3 months (partly also because she had suffered from severe postnatal depression), seemed to have many analogies to the analyst’s countertransference feelings of helplessness, total insufficiency, identification with the painful psychosomatic symptoms of the analysand, and finally depression. The developmental perspective has thus, of course, additional relevance for psychoanalytic treatments, but it is beyond the scope of this paper to also describe Mr. X’s processes of change during psychoanalysis itself in detail.

From our theoretical perspective it is relevant that memories are not seen as one-to-one retrievals of certain historical events but as a continuous process of change of the whole organism in interaction with its environment; or, to put it provocatively: every single procedure for remembering modifications the actual ram, despite the fact that while doing so this process isn't an human judgements building although the intricate method towards the fantastic real truth associated with previous developing activities.

Let us take another example to further illustrate the view of an embodied memory taking account of all three of the basic theoretical topics just mentioned:

We observe the 6-month-old infant Peter taking apples and newspapers from a table. Peter puts everything in his mouth–apples and newspaper. After a while he only grasps the apples, leaving the newspapers aside. From our perspective as observers of this scene we suppose that Peter has learnt from experience and “remembers” that apples taste better then newspapers. Therefore he now prefers to taste apples. Analyzing the infant’s behavior, we (the observers) postulate that Peter selects apples by reference to his former experiences: according to the observer he has functioning memory at his disposal. We have defined memory from an “outside” perspective–observing the infant’s behavior–and not by looking into his brain (memory as a theoretical construct and frame-of-reference problem). It is an attribution to the infant as a whole (we evaluate his whole behavior), not to one part of the infant, say its brain. This means that we do not have to postulate any kind of internal representation in order to describe his behavior.

Another important observation is that the infant has developed categories: he can now differentiate between apples and newspapers (for further discussion see).

The frame-of-reference problem states that in explaining memory functions we must make a clear distinction between observable behavior and the internal brain mechanisms that, in the interaction with the real world, lead to a particular behavior. This implies that behavior cannot be reduced to internal processes, nor to brain processes for that matter. Doing so would be to commit a category error (to use a philosophical term). This specific appears simple, ; however , it truly is a lot more shocking there's good confusion inside books about it problem.

Applied to memory, it implies that a clear distinction must be made between the theoretical construct and underlying mechanisms responsible for mediating between the past and the present. Ashby’s concept of memory is neutral to the mechanisms by which it is implemented in the organism. In biological organisms the mechanisms are to be found at the level of neural plasticity, whereas in artificial systems such as robots or
computers they are situated at the level of switching circuits implemented in silicon. Another example would be immune systems, which can also be described by invoking the concept of memory in the interaction of the organism with environment . In all these cases, it makes sense to use the concept of memory.

We can only describe on an observable level when and in what interactional context Mr. X was able to “remember” his unbearable bodily state from his first weeks of life. Our observations are exclusively based on the psychoanalytical situation (analysis of Mr. X’s behavior, feelings, and verbalizations, the analyst’s countertransference reactions after the summer break, etc.)–we never had the possibility of “looking straight into Mr. X’s brain,” and thus cannot know what neural and neurophysiological processes had been activated when Mr. X was able to remember the childhood experiences. This differentiation seems simple. Nevertheless, you can often find a confusion between the level of description of memory processes and underlying brain mechanisms in the literature.We all ourself manufactured this group error in the above-mentioned 1986 papers.

Some authors have tried to ferret out the mechanisms underlying memory in biological systems. It is important to emphasize that these mechanisms should not be seen as “being” the memory, but rather as implementing those processes which, as the organism interacts with the environment, lead to behavior that we try to explain by invoking the theoretical notion of memory.

As we will illustrate, the ideas developed in this section naturally connect to clinically relevant concepts, although the mode of argumentation might at first seem unfamiliar or strange for readers unacquainted with this research tradition (see Introduction). Cognitive scientists often use metaphors or short stories to explain their ideas. For instance, Ashby wrote this “story” discussing memory as a theoretical construct: “Suppose I am in a friend’s house and, as a car goes past outside, his dog rushes to a corner of the room and cringes. To me the behavior is causeless and inexplicable. Then my friend says: ‘He was run over by a car six months ago.’ The behavior is now accounted for by reference to an event of six months ago” . In other words, the explanation is not given in terms of the current internal state of the dog, but by reference to an event in the past.Memory, then, is a theoretical construct that connects the state of the individual in the past and the influence the event had on the individual to the behavior in the current situation. This theoretical notion of memory is to be clearly distinguished from the mechanisms mediating these processes. In this sense, memory is not something sitting somewhere in a box inside the head of the dog, but is a theoretical construct and is attributed to the complete organism. A similar idea is also reflected in the so-called “ecological perspective” on memory, where the function of memory within natural contexts is investigated.

This kind of notion of memory is quite natural to help psychoanalytic imagining. The particular analyst observes inside a distinct framework unacceptable actions that she / he does not comprehend. The particular purpose subsequently would be to find analogies to help conduct with sooner circumstances (events who have occured in the past) that were perhaps adaptive at the time, and by simply invoking the idea of memory may well make clear the actual person’s recent actions.

In our case history we described how the analyst did not understand the sudden extreme change in the behavior of Mr. X after the summer break. She understood that his rage and attacks on her had to do with the separation, but she had no idea why the affects were of such intensity, or why the anger and disappointment obviously had such a total and archaic quality connected to obviously psychosomatic reactions in the patient as well as in her own countertransference feelings. Only the information on the sudden change in his bodily state when his mother changed his food in the 7th week of his life made it possible to understand that the extreme reaction in the presence of the psychoanalytical relationship had been brought about by “memories” of preverbal early experiences.

From a theoretical perspective it is important that Mr. X’s memories were not “retrieved from a box inside his head” but were products of a theoretical construct connecting the observed state of Mr. X in the analytical situation with his probable experiences in early childhood.

Again, in order to connect present with past information, nothing needs to be said about the internal neural mechanisms that mediate this transfer. These considerations represent an instance of the notorious frame-of-reference problem, which will be discussed next.

The classical conceptualization of memory leads to many theoretical problems, as has been discussed extensively in the cognitive science literature 6 and in the psychoanalytic literature . It cannot, for example, be used to give a plausible explanation of how knowledge can be applied repeatedly to new situations, i.e., how learning processes occur that require new situational analysis, how problem solutions can be transferred from one domain to another, and how new categories are established. Just one example: it is no problem for us to recognize the Jupiter symphony by Mozart even if a neighbor is practicing parts of it on the piano. This process of remembering cannot be based on simple pattern matching because the current pattern (piano music) is different from the earlier one (orchestral music). It would therefore not be helpful to just store a pattern somewhere in the brain. Recognition is rather a constructive inner process relating a past experience (listening to the symphony) to the present situation (hearing Mozart played on the piano).

For this reason (and many cognitive scientists today agree) it is necessary to conceptualize memory in a fundamentally different way; in other words, a change of paradigm seems indispensable a topic that we want to discuss now.7 Most of these alternative conceptualizations capitalize on the notion of embodiment which means–as we will discuss below–that memory can only be understood in the interaction of an organism with its environment. It turns out that if memory is conceptualized according to this new paradigm, some of the fundamental problems in understanding memory can be resolved.

For an extended time I found that complicated to know thoroughly the fundamental distinctions relating to the methods associated with memory in conventional and in embodied cognitive science, that's recently been intensively influenced with the neurobiological human brain study with the final decades. We all for that reason want to discuss about three with the central subjects rather broadly:

− memory as a theoretical construct
− the frame-of-reference problem
− the developmental perspective
− illustrating them briefly with psychoanalytic discourses and our case material.

Fifteen years ago we discussed these questions in a paper in the International Review of Psychoanalysis, analyzing three key scenes of a psychoanalysis . In these analyses we tried to start an interdisciplinary dialogue between “classical cognitive science” and psychoanalysis on questions relating to memory processes. In 1983 we had begun to refer to the recent approaches to memory–which were much discussed at the time and were expounded by Schank among others in his book Dynamic Memory –to explain memory processes during psychoanalyses and seemed to shed new light on core psychoanalytic concepts, such as repetition ncompulsion, the rule of abstinence, and the working through of central conflicts in transference. Among other things, we showed that the focus concept of psychoanalysis can be described very precisely by a memory structure that resembled Schank’s TOP, the “thematic organization point” .We showed that the psychoanalytical concept of a focus, as illustrated by the “triangle of insight”  connecting analogous structures of an current conflict with those discovered in the transference and biographical information, corresponds in detail to Schank’s TOP.We illustrated this hypothesis by analyzing some information from the psychoanalysis of a severely depressed woman.We found analogous components in the current conflict situation (feeling exploited by her husband), the transference (being convinced that her analyst would “only” be interested in pursuing her own goals, e.g., earning money), and a traumatic experience of early childhood (being exploited by her mother as “protection” against Russian soldiers during a frightening night-time escape during World War II). We discussed how in all these three “key scenes” we found the components of the TOP–a finding which seemed to deepen our clinical and theoretical understanding of the psychodynamics of the analysand and her memories evoked in psychoanalysis.

We could now apply this memory concept in an matter analogous to the above case. In the current conflict with his brother Mr. X. experienced a sudden, unexpected change: he lost his good relationship to him from

                                                                 Triangle of insight

one day to the next and felt enormous rage and furious impulses towards him. In the transference we observed similar reactions: after the summer break the analyst was no longer experienced as a “good object” but an unempathetic, cold one responsible for painful and unbearable feelings of rage, disappointment, and despair in the patient and refused to help him find a way out of his present unbearable inner and physical state. Inquiring of his mother, Mr. X obtained the biographical information about the allergic milk reaction in the seventh week of his life which exposed him for 3 months to unbearable bodily states, and the “refusal” to offer a solution, to get him out of the painful situation. In all the three topics we find the same (cognitive) components of the TOP.

According to Schank, a TOP includes the following components: a goal configuration, expectations of plans and outcomes, actual plans and outcomes, and explanations of discrepancies. TOPs are abstract memory structures that are stored and are usually unconsciously recalled by socalled demons.“Demons” are programs that are continuously on the alert for an event to take place; in this case the event is the occurrence of a situation that is structurally similar to an earlier one. Although Schank talks about “dynamic memory,” this concept presupposes a “static” notion of memory. The dynamic aspect of memory in Schank’s concept is the establishment of new references to other memory structures. For example, if there is a new failed expectation, a reference is established from the failure point to a representation of the situation from which the (failed) expectation was generated. However, this notion still implies a kind of storehouse in which memory structures–knowledge–are kept, like records stored on a disk in a computer. Long-term memory is understood by analogy to Aristotle’s famous notion of memory as a wax tablet on which experiences are written. If the demons recognize a certain pattern in current information as being similar to a memory structure stored in the long-term memory, this structure will be transferred to the short-term memory, where it then is accessible to conscious remembering.

Schank thus formulates a “classical” definition of memory which is still very popular, and a significant number of psychologists, psychoanalysts, memory researchers, and nonscientists also maintain this view. If one asked a layperson what memory was, more than likely his answer would be something like “a place in the brain where information is stored.” In everyday language, we often describe mental processes as objects in an actual physical space. For example, we speak about storing something in the memory, or searching through our memory, or of holding ideas in our minds; like physical objects, memories may be lost, hard to find, and so forth.Memory as a stored structure is also found in many textbooks today . Baddeley  uses the following definition: “Human memory is a system for storing and retrieving information, information that is, of course, acquired through our senses.” In essence memory is viewed as information that is stored and later retrieved.

The question if and how such early traumatizations can be remembered and then be understood in the transference have been debated at length and in great detail within the psychoanalytic community during the last few years–an interesting discourse that we can do no more than mention here. The following section describes some of our own efforts to contribute to this discussion.

A 30-year-old computer science student (Mr. X) was looking for psychotherapeutic help in a desperate life situation. Because of heavy psychosomatic symptoms (eating and sleeping disorder, migraine, attacks of dizziness, skin irritation) he had not been able to pursue his studies for the past 5 years. He was living completely isolated and seemed increasingly to be developing paranoid fantasies. The only relationship he maintained at that stage was to his brother, who is 3 years younger than him. However, this relationship was crumbling, chiefly because he had insulted and even physically attacked his brother in outbursts of rage that neither he nor his brother was able to understand.

Mr. X arrived with the explicit desire to start a psychoanalysis. He had read about it and considered the method to be the one right for him. I had my doubts concerning this indication because I considered Mr. X to be a borderline patient and asked myself whether high frequent treatment would be the right treatment decision for him. During the first year of psychoanalysis Mr. X controlled the distance between us by means of marked intellectualization and an almost complete repulsion of emotions during the sessions. It was almost impossible to obtain new analytical insights: the analysis seemed mostly to cover conscious processes. Still, the patient arrived on time for the appointments and insisted vigorously on replacing any appointments that I had to cancel. He seemed to existentially need the holding function of psychoanalysis. He changed his behavior–although this did not appear to be connected to any insights gained in the psychoanalysis. He attended lectures and courses again and was more able to concentrate. Also, the psychosomatic symptoms remitted somewhat, which led Mr. X to say before we entered the summer break: “The treatment does me good . . .”

The sequence I would like briefly to describe now took place after this first long summer break. Mr. X arrived obviously distraught at our first appointment. He began straight away to heavily insult me and seemed to become absolutely beside himself with rage and anger because I had dared to disappear, to go on vacation for 4 weeks. This was irresponsible, selfish, and showed that I was not at all interested in my job and in my analysands. “I doubt whether you have had proper training as an analyst at all . Maybe you are just a ‘run-of-the-mill’ analyst” . . . I was surprised by the violence of his anger and despair, and during the session failed to reach him emotionally or by means of an interpretation of the experiences he had had due to the separation etc. Although it was possible to address his severe reaction to the separation and to prevent another outburst of rage, Mr. X instead fell into a long silence, which for me was of an even more frightening quality than his insults.

Some extremely difficult weeks followed. Mr. X seemed to only be able to choose between two states of mind on the couch: either heavy insults, anger, and attacks, or else silence and retreat. As to the content, I noticed that his attacks were mostly aimed at my analytical function.Mr. X insulted me not only as stupid, restricted, and unable to understand him even in the widest sense, but also as incompetent and not professionally trained. As a consequence of his attacks and extreme silence, I found myself confronted with a severe feeling of impotence, inadequacy, and even depressing self-doubts. However, the most difficult thing was to bear the physical reaction: his attacks during the sessions finally caused an inner tension to that extent that I began to feel sick and from time to time even suffered from stomach cramps–psychosomatic reactions which are unusual for me during psychoanalytical sessions. I then sought a better understanding of what had happened in the psychoanalytical session by means of a supervision session with an experienced colleague.

We presumed that the enormity of the attack and the silence indicated a traumatization suffered in a very early stage of Mr. X’s development, probably during his first year of life, in a phase of development in which physical and affective states of mind can not yet be either enclosed or symbolized. Had he suffered from an early traumatization, perhaps caused by separation from the primary object which I felt in my depressive countertransference feelings? The discussion with my colleague had, for me, mediated a certain distance and enabled me to increasingly reflec critically on my fierce reactions and countertransference fantasies. Not long after, Mr. X, following a session that had included heavy outbursts of rage, arrived a bit calmer to the next appointment. I carefully communicated my supposition that the long summer break could have led to an intense reactivation of unbearable feelings of dependence and desolation, which he could have tried to cope with by means of extreme aggressive attacks. I asked, following an intuitive idea, if he had, after sessions like the one before, felt any physical reaction. He told me that he had “felt sick throughout his whole body,” that he had not been able to eat, and that he had suffered from heavy stomach cramps. I was surprised by the analogy to my own psychosomatic symptoms during and after such sessions. I told him that the total quality of these states of mind led me to assume a reactivation of very early experiences, “ which could have been preserved in the body” and which “might try to become accessible to our analytical comprehension by this means which both of us find unbearable. Do you know, by chance, whether you suffered from a severe illness or an eating disorder during your first year of life, or whether you and your mother were separated?” Mr. X answered in the negative, but called his mother and found that 6 weeks after giving birth she had had the impression that she did not have enough milk. She abruptly stopped breast-feeding her baby and used baby food. Her baby reacted with a strong allergy, with a painful, itching skin irritation over his whole body. The mother told the analysand that she had not been able to touch the infant, that he always screamed, and that it had been almost impossible to calm him. She almost fell into despair, but after 3 months she had, in her words, “everything under control,” and gave a different formula food to the child.As a consequence, the symptoms disappeared. “And you’ve been shouting at me since the summer holidays that I did everything wrong, that I gave you ‘the wrong analytical nutrition,’ that I had changed completely in the holidays and that I refused to give you the right ‘analytical nutrition’ which could make everything turn out well again . . . The analytical sessions no longer do you any good as they used to before the holidays–they are just horrible now. Every contact with me seems to be unbearable . . .”–Mr. X began to cry for the first time in the psychoanalysis.

During the following weeks we were able to successively understand the reactivation of the early traumatization: the trauma laboriously found its way into his images, visualizations, and finally his language: it had become conscious and in the following years became successively better understood as one of the unconscious sources of the patient’s severe psychosomatic suffering.

In the last 20 or 30 years a vision of Sigmund Freud has been seeming to become reality: It is well known that Freud never gave up his hope that some day developments in the neurosciences might contribute to a “scientific foundation” of psychoanalysis in terms of the natural sciences. One reason why Freud himself did not continue his own attempts for such a neuroscientific foundation of psychoanalysis, his Outline of psychoanalysis , was his confrontation with the obvious limitations of the methodologies of the neurosciences of his time . He then consistently defined psychoanalysis as a “pure psychology of the unconscious.”

Recent developments in the neurosciences, e.g., the fascinating possibilities for studying the living brain by neuroimaging techniques (MEG, magnetence phalogram; ERP, event related potential; PET, positron emission tomography; fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging), as well as studies with the so-called neuroanatomical method developed by Kaplan-Solms and Solms , have initiated a boom and intensified dialogue between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences during the last 20 years or so.1 1999 saw the publication of the first volume of the international journal Neuro-Psychoanalysis, in which leading psychoanalysts and neuroscientists present their studies of emotion and affect, memory, sleeping and dreaming, conflict and trauma, conscious and unconscious problem solving, etc. In 2000 the International Society for Neuropsychoanalysis was founded, which organizes international conferences every year. In many different countries interdisciplinary groups of researchers have started to work systematically with patients who have suffered brain lesions which can be precisely localized in the brain. The joint aims of these research groups are the development of specific psychoanalytic treatment techniques which will enable us to help groups of patients (e.g., those suffering from a neglect syndrome after a stroke) therapeutically in the future . Another common aim is the intention to study the old topic of European philosophy in a new way: to investigate the relationship between brain and mind by systematic and critical reflections on the clinical psychoanalytical findings in these groups of patients worldwide.

As the different contributions to this volume illustrate, the dialogue between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences is of outstanding importance thanks to an increasing number of fascinating empirical and experimental studies in the areas of psychotherapy research, developmental and dream research, and many others, as well as to studies in the field of so-called basic science. However, just one critical introductory remark: after our experiences in a joint effort between 20 psychoanalysts and neuroscientists studying memory, dreams, and cognitive and affective problem solving from the perspectives of these two disciplines in a joint research project from 1992 to 1998 (supported by the Köhler Foundation, Darmstadt, Germany), it seems important to us to critically reflect on the epistemological dimensions of this dialogue .We see the dialogue between these disciplines as fascinating, innovative, and interesting–but also challenging and complicated for both sides. We often do not speak the same language, and apply different concepts even when we are using analogous terms. Furthermore, we often feel identified with divergent traditions in science and in philosophy of science. We need a great deal of tolerance and a lot of staying power to really achieve an intensive exchange of ideas of the kind that will enable us to reach new frontiers in our own thinking: to crack apart our former understanding and conceptualizations and resist the idealizing tendency to expect “solutions” for unsolved problems in our own discipline from the other (foreign) discipline– which is, like a blank screen, capable of attracting projections and projective identifications. To take new findings from the other discipline seriously means to undergo a period of uncertainty and of unease: it is always painful to leave “certainties” and false beliefs developed in your own field. To go through such a period of uncertainty and unease is, however– as shown by our actual interdisciplinary experiences–essential and unavoidable: it seems to be a prerequisite for a productive and constructive dialogue that goes beyond rediscovering already established disciplinary knowledge. Comparing models that have been developed in the two disciplines to explain their own specific data, collected by specific (and very different) research methods, involves encountering complex and sophisticated problems of philosophy of science and epistemology. To mention just two examples: the well-known danger of the eliminative reductionism of psychological processes onto neurobiological processes, or the consequences of unreflecting transferral of concepts, methods, and interpretations from one scientific discipline onto another one have to be prevented.

Another interesting aspect is elaborated on in a recent book by Michael Hagner , who discusses the enormous influence of neuroimaging techniques on current science and societies. The fantasized possibility “to have a direct view into the living and working brain” carries enormous seductive and fascinating power. It may, for example,mobilize the fantasy of gaining new, direct diagnostic capacities:

You may then differentiate between unstructured, chaotic forms of thinking and mathematical problem solving . . . between memories of earliest experiences in childhood, the last fight with your spouse, or conflicts with your parents, between erotic dreams and most exciting love affairs. In the twentieth century such discoveries were more or less reserved to the field of psychoanalysis. Probably none of the ‘X-ray examinations’ of the brain will ever be capable of extracting the biographical details, intimacies, and covered-over psychological levels that psychoanalysis has done. But the point is different: psychoanalysis, without any doubt, has had a great influence and has changed many things enormously, but it has not become a standardized method for bio-psycho-politics. This is probably not due mainly to the fact that the assumptions of psychoanalysis are mistaken, or that the unconscious and the drives are not attractive to such social engineering. The real problem is that psychoanalysis is too complicated, too unwieldy, too difficult to practice, and needs too much time . . .

The alteration [from psychoanalysis to the application of neuroimaging techniques] could lead to the danger that the variety and relevance of mental life will be evaluated according to their ability to be visualized . . . The prize for such a development is that the investigation of the deeper connections, correlations, explanations, calculations, and narratives–in other words the historic, scientific, textual linear thinking–will be displaced
by a new, visualizing, “superficial” kind of thought. In respect to the sciences of human beings, this means that the “deep digging” for which psychoanalysis stood might be replaced by the superficial insights of neuroimaging pictures. In this case, understanding human beings would turn into an “externalization of materialized forms of representation.” I don’t mean that the subject will be eliminated, but another anthropology could turn into reality which–in a double sense of the word–would produce structures of the surface.

Taking Hagner’s analyses and warnings seriously, I gained a new appreciation of a long tradition that has been trying to bridge between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences and other scientific disciplines, which seems to be not very well known. This is the dialogue between psychoanalysis and so-called cognitive science. In this dialogue it has always been very clear that careful reflection on epistemological and methodological problems is essential to any careful and fruitful comparison of models developed in the different fields.Again and again researchers have to realize that mental processes will never be directly observable. “Precisely because mental phenomena are not directly observable and therefore, from the purist standpoint of natural sciences, do not even exist, it is fundamentally impossible to regard them as explananda and to look for an explanation for them in the sense intended in the natural sciences” . To summarize this epistemological finding in a simplified way: One can never observe mental processes directly,“objectively.” Only subjects can describe mental processes–the mind! One can also never directly compare data collected in different fields by different research methods: there is no such things as “looking directly into the functioning of the brain”! All we have are explanations, interpretations, in other words “models” which try to explain the collected data in a particular field of observation as adequately and productively as possible–models which can then be tested, validated, and modified by further experiments or empirical studies in the neurosciences on the one hand or by further clinical observations in the psychoanalytic situation in psychoanalysis on the other hand. For this reason, getting involved in a dialogue between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences means starting an exchange on models based on very different kinds of data, research instruments, and so on.

In this first vignette, I will describe aspects of three sessions which illustrate the emergence of feeling memories following a head injury.

Peter is a talented middle-aged married man in one of the caring professions. His father was a gentle, scholarly man and his mother a kind, self-effacing woman who suffered from bouts of severe depression which required admission to mental hospital at irregular intervals during Peter’s childhood; this meant that he was required to stay with relatives for some weeks at a time.

The week before the three sessions I shall briefly describe, Peter had a sudden, violent, but not life-threatening accident in which he struck his head and body on a concrete post and suffered transient unconsciousness. After a week’s convalescence, he returned to therapy in a sorry state, with stitches in his head and a cut and bruised face. He lay down very slowly and with great difficulty. He recounted details of the accident and clearly was still quite shocked. He told me he wanted me to know what it was like to feel he was dying.Near the end of the session he attempted to sit up but said it was impossible. He tried several more times but each time he sank back in a very distressed state saying he could not get up. I fetched him a glass of water and he made it clear that he did not want me to help him up. I moved the armchair closer to the couch, reassured him that there was no hurry, and told him I was leaving the room for a few minutes. Three or four minutes later he had managed to sit up with the use of the chair. When I returned, he asked me to leave again because he said my absence made it easier for him to get up. Five minutes later he called a farewell and left. My medical knowledge reassured me that he had not had a cardiovascular episode; however, I felt quite painfully while I was outside the room that I had been neglectful of him, but I also sensed that at that moment my presence was symbolically too close to a desperately needed object.

In our next session he again slowly and painfully lay down. He told me that he had felt very reassured that I had left the room last session because it meant that I had not regarded him as a medical emergency. He spoke further about his accident and how he had thought he was dying. Then he said to me with great feeling: “There is one area where you have not understood me, you haven’t realized that I want to look for what is actually true. Bottle feeding isn’t real milk. My mother seems to be saying: ‘Drink it up: it doesn’t matter that there isn’t a real breast2.’ She would say, ‘No such thing as can’t,worse things at sea and such like.’ I was longing for you to hold my hand last session. I don’t want to be told my thoughts are at fault.”

I told him that he was telling me what if it felt like to be “fobbed off,” not to be allowed to have feelings of self pity or helplessness or need, and what it felt like to be told that “others had it worse” and that “you aren’t really feeling what you’re feeling.” I also told him that the terrifying fear he had had after his accident that he was dying was probably an echo of a terror from childhood.

However, what I did not tell him at the time, and which I now believe in restudying the material, was that he was also struggling to disentangle the difference between his experience of me now, as a representative of his autobiographical “internal mother,” and the reemergence of actual “bits” of feeling memory from the past, possibly from amygdala circuits, as a result of his head injury.

As the end of the session approached, once more he struggled to sit up and sank back again onto the pillow.He tried several more times and with the help of the chair eventually sat upright. He then said hesitantly: “I think you ought to leave me.” I replied that I would if that was what he really wanted. Slowly and painfully he inched his legs onto the floor, smiled, and said: “You’re a cunning b . . . aren’t you? You were absolutely right not to leave. I don’t feel embarrassed any more by this incident.”

In the following session he spoke more about his accident and his various medical advisors, but near the end of the session he struggled to the sitting position and said a little desperately: “I’m so sorry I’m putting on
this show.” I said straightaway: “This is not a performance, it is a “show”; you are showing me in the only way you can what it is like to have powerful feelings that never have had and never will have words.”

Space does not allow for a full discussion of all the important material in the sessions following Peter’s accident, so I will confine it to a few comments on aspects that are directly relevant to this essay.When Peter found that he was unable to move from the couch, it came as no surprise to me because I realized we had been there before and that I had been “primed” in the sense that there had been clues in his material from past sessions which indicated his need for close attachment to me; for example, he would often make jokes as he was getting off the couch; he would write out his cheque at the end of a session always borrowing my pen; if he had been angry in a session, he would always “make up” before leaving. His overinclusive accounts of happenings in his life as a defense against feelings came to be known to us both as “my seminars.” Though I tried to understand his feelings using transference interpretations, it always seemed that he wanted and needed “something more” . Two sessions before his accident he realized halfway through a session that he had been using his “seminar” technique to talk his way away from his feelings. He directed his frustration and amused vexation at himself and struck his forehead with the palm of his hand: “Ahrr, there I go again, I feel so frustrated, I feel I want to be hysterical . . .” I particularly noticed his unusual phrase.

I suspected that most of the transference references were for the years from 5 onwards when his autobiographical memory was firmly established and deference for others and concealing painful feelings had become egosyntonic.Intrapsychically he had to find a way of getting at these earlier feelings which had no autobiographical content . . . As with repressed contents so with implicit memory, it cannot directly be brought into consciousness.

In the sessions that followed he did much useful self-interpretation.He identified the tears in his eyes following the rendition of some French religious music with words that spoke of the relief of suffering, through the supporting hands of God. One morning he asked if he could bring his bicycle into my hall and he almost preempted my interpretation in the session with a clarity of understanding to which I had nothing to add.

From a phenomenological and descriptive point of view, it is my view that Freud’s Id energies derive from phylogenetic biological mechanisms,whose contents therefore have not been acquired by the individual. They do not contribute to consciousness as there is no neocortical involvement.

Cautiously Freud writes something similar in the last paragraph of The unconscious  : “If inherited mental formations exist in the human being–something analogous to instinct in animals–these constitute the nucleus of the unconscious.” Repression maintains the unconscious state and is here defined as the rendering unconscious of any sexual or aggressive conflict-laden feeling, impulse as idea. The author draws a clear distinction between the homeostatic motivational systems   (for example, sleep or nutrition), other motivational systems which include attachment interactions , and the sexual and aggressive instincts described by Freud. It remains to be seen how Panksepp’s affect-generating “emotional command systems” , which range from seeking systems, through rage, fear, panic, lust, and care systems, to those that elaborate play, relate to Freud’s instincts. Panksepp regards these as regulatory systems but not drives. All these motivational systems are innately based, and it is reasonable to suppose that some are phylogenetically older than others. It is not proposed here that instinctual life is a simple dichotomy between sexuality and aggression, but that these two drives have a unique importance in understanding human behavior to the extent that with them has evolved their own controller–repression. Freud was always perplexed by the degree of unpleasure that derived from sexuality which then demanded repression while equally or more severe unpleasure from other aspects of life did not.

In my opinion there must be an independent source for the release of unpleasure in sexual life: once that source is present, it can activate sensations of disgust, lend force to morality, and so on . . . .As long as there is no correct theory of the sexual process, the question of the origin of the unpleasure operating in repression remains unanswered.

One of the most important reasons why Freud introduced his second topography was that he realized that no single agency could be described as “the unconscious,” since not only the Id but parts of the Ego and Superego in the second topography could be described as unconscious. And as Laplanche and Pontalis point out , the term “unconscious” is used more as an adjective within the second topography. It could be said that this amounts to awareness that, though there appears to be an agency, “the unconscious,” the mind also utilizes unconscious processing in many different ways and for different “purposes.” For example, the suppression of memory (it is sometimes called forgetting!) is probably the most commonly employed mechanism for removing from consciousness an idea or an event which may cause discomfort or inconvenience. It does not involve the dynamic unconscious and could be described as preconscious. For example, it allows us a “now” experience when we take the same bus on the same route every day.We could remember yesterday’s bus journey if we tried. Similarly the reason why we did not post that letter with the cheque in it was, on reflection, because we thought the parking fine unjust.


Neuroscientists are on the whole much happier with the adjectival version of unconscious! For example, Kandel , following a discussion on implicit memory (he appears to be confining himself to procedural memory), writes that these findings “bear no resemblance to Freud’s unconscious. It is not related to instinctual strivings or to sexual conflicts, and the information never enters consciousness … Where, if it exists at all, is the other unconscious?” Using this formulation, where indeed! There is absolutely no resemblance between the nonconsciousness of reflexive procedural memory and Freud’s dynamic unconscious: to suggest otherwise is like saying that the silent transport of neural impulses reveals another “unconscious.”

The new memory typology revealed to psychoanalysis another set of phenomena in which unconscious and nonconscious processes participate. Before our awareness of implicit memory, other known events involving unconscious or nonconscious mental processes or events were: fainting (for psychological reasons), sleeping and dreaming, dissociative states including somnambulism and fugue states, suppression of memory .

(nonconsciously processed), posthypnotic states, and, of course, repression. It is not surprising then, that following the description of three further “scientifically based” examples of unconscious or nonconscious mental activity–priming, emotional memory, and procedural memory–both disciplines began to question whether Freud’s unconscious should be reassessed in the light of these discoveries. For the reasons I have stated, I think psychoanalytical theorists were intrigued by the nonconsciousness of procedural memory without examining whether this was a truly “mental” process or nothing more than a reflexive, physiological one. Notbeing- conscious was confused with unconsciousness. The “wrong” type of implicit memory, the “mindless memory,” was chosen by some psychoanalysts, supported by neuroscience, to challenge the relevance and importance of Freud’s unconscious and its jailer–repression. It seems perfectly reasonable, though contrary to the thesis of this essay, to advance the idea that object relations patterns form procedural memories which are unconscious because they are procedural and not because they are repressed , but why does this then mean that “the removal of repression is no longer to be considered a key to therapeutic action?” . Because other types of unconscious processing have been described, does analytic work on repression lose significance? Cannot a door have more than one lock? I entirely agree with Fonagy  that one of Freud’s central ideas, that lifting repression and overcoming resistance would reveal the patient’s past, has turned out to be flawed, because we now know not only that perception is not immaculate, but that much  recall is a mere improvisation on actuality! The important point, however,is that repression has for so long been regarded as a nuclear theme in psychoanalysis that it is hard for psychoanalysis not to regard the repression– unconscious equation as the only manifestation of unconscious or nonconscious processing. My understanding of the essence of Freud’s paper “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” is that because Freud was consciously “unaware” of the significance of what we now call implicit memory, he employed repression as the process whereby memories were concealed.We now suspect that the declarative element in these memories was absent or distorted because they could not be securely registered in the mind due to functional immaturity in the brain. So acting out became for Freud the only window on the memory that was composed of feelings without words.

Looking for truthful memory behind the door marked “repression” is looking in the wrong place; however, squinting above, below, and behind this door for scraps of evidence about that phylogenetic alien that we call the dynamically repressed unconscious remains a vital part of helping our patients to learn about their own minds.

Of increasing importance is the attempt to look behind that other door marked “implicit” memory which is not repressed but clues to which are just elusive: access, as has been described, is restricted by the nature of the “plumbing.” It would seem likely that the dream process, as well as “servicing” the royal road, the preconscious routes and unconscious manifestations of neurological damage, also offers glimpses into implicit emotional memory.

I have implied that the process of gaining some access to some aspects of the repressed unconscious and implicit memory is a circuitous process; in fact, gaining access directly to either is impossible. Freud makes it quite clear that the dynamic unconscious is only accessible to consciousness when, through analysis, it has become preconscious. So the preconscious is not repressed, but it is not conscious either. Freud is emphatic when he writes in The Ego and the Id: “We see, however, that we have two kinds of unconscious–the one which is latent but capable of becoming conscious [“the suppressed”], and the one which is repressed and which is not, in itself and without more ado, capable of becoming conscious".

The new memory typology from neuroscience has had far-reaching consequences for psychoanalysis. In addition to the dynamic repressed unconscious and the unconscious suppressed content, we are now aware of implicit memory comprising nonconscious and unconscious emotional memory, unconscious priming and nonconsciously processed procedural memory. Because different pathways and systems are involved, it is not surprising that implicit memory and the repressed unconscious require different techniques for their elucidation.

The “flavor” of a clinical session may suddenly change and the routine of association followed by interpretation may be interrupted by a change of gear from the patient when affect takes over from cognition. The therapist must be alert to the sudden, often subtle and silent variation in the patient’s affective experience during a session. So as not to miss the fleeting nature of a small concealed eruption of emotion, I sit behind but to the side of my patients from where I can see their face more clearly. To miss such a moment would, I think, be described by Stern et al. as a “failed now moment” . Stern et al. differentiate their “something more” from a transference interpretation by describing the first as a “mutative relationship” and the interpretation as “mutative information".

I entirely agree with them that the foundations of this “shared implicit relationship” have their roots in the earliest relationships, and that implicit knowledge and memory (in my view emotional memory and priming, not procedural) is not repressed because it does not belong to the unconscious instinctual system that employs repression to maintain the unconsciousness. It belongs to the implicit emotional memory system that has initially no explicit counterpart.

My small area of dissent from Stern et al.’s point of view concerns their description of a “moment of meeting” . To paraphrase their five points: It is the opposite of business as usual; I am not a modernrepresentative of anybody; the experience is now; we don’t need to talk about it; and, lastly, a technical response is inadequate and the “analyst must respond with something that is experienced as specific to the relationship with the patient and that is expressive of her own experience . . . and carries her signature” . I disagree with only this last point because at that moment the analyst can be experienced as a facilitator, genuinely empathic, “on my side” and so on. However, the experience for the patient is an emotion coming from they “know not where,” and the analyst’s signature at this point could be experienced as an intrusion. A grunt of acknowledgment or a hyperattentive silence could serve the situation better when a patient feels free to experience being alone with their feelings in the presence of a trusted other whose existence and support is not in question . The safety of the therapist’s total involvement permits this “memory in feeling”.

It is often not easy to judge when an interpretation, transference or otherwise, is most helpful or whether “now” is definitely not a businessas- usual experience for the patient and a different sort of listening would be more useful. The degree of affect in a patient’s utterances is not necessarily a good guide because the patient may be experiencing strong feelings towards the therapist which originate from a time when declarative memory was fully functioning and the autobiographical memory accompanied the feelings. A transference interpretation may then be the only appropriate intervention. However, it is often the patient who makes the situation clear. An interpretation, however accurate, will not be heard by the patient if he is in the grip of powerful implicit emotional memory where words from the therapist are as irrelevant as they once were. The interpretation, if heard at all, will be experienced as a background noise or even as intrusive. For the patient, his feelings are not at that moment about the relationship in the room. Concentrated attunement is required from the therapist at such times. Sometimes comments such as: “I’m into something else right now” or “I’m somewhere else” can give the therapista verbal clue. Practically speaking, it is often much more difficult!

It is suggested that “It is the emotional availability of the caregiver in intimacy which seems to be the most central growth-promoting feature of the early rearing experience” , and where this availability appears not to have been there, it is likely that there will be a need in the patient for more “emotional memory” communications; “repressed contents” communications including transference interpretations will seem to be more helpful where the patient’s mental life is predominantly “depressive” rather than “paranoid-schizoid.”

The moving account by Margaret Little, as patient, where she describes her “implicit relational knowing” experiences with Winnicott and how she later ordered these experiences in her mind as author when her anxieties had become more depressive, illustrate how feelings without words can be metabolized though empathy. “It is a very remarkable thing that the unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious” . This surely refers to an implicit, nonrepressed unconscious, sensed but not described by Freud . Margaret Little writes:

Literally, through many long hours he held my two hands clasped between his, almost like an umbilical cord, while I lay, often hidden beneath the blanket silent, inert, withdrawn, in panic, rage or tears, asleep and sometimes dreaming. Sometimes he would become drowsy, fall asleepand wake with a jerk, to which I would react with anger, terrified and feeling as if I had been hit…[a “failed now moment” ; author’s comment]. He must have suffered much boredom and exhaustion in these hours, and sometimes even pain in his hands”.

Margaret Little’s own implicit awareness later enabled her to reciprocate Winnicott’s empathy when she diagnosed and assisted him when, unknown to him, he had a heart attack during a session with her. Truly, a shared implicit relationship.

From Freud’s pre-analytic writings, it is clear that he was only too aware of his patients’ powerful feelings directed towards him, but also of their propensity to act on those feelings instead of reporting them.

As is well known, Freud’s early thoughts about transference were that it was an “obstacle” to be overcome and a powerful form of resistance ; however, by 1905 he was able to write: “Transference, what seems
ordained to be the greatest obstacle of psychoanalysis, becomes its most powerful ally, if its presence can be detected each time and explained to the patient”. ally”, transference; however, it is only in the era of the
new memory typology, with its confirmation of the importance and significance of an unconscious process that is not repressed, that acting out can be reevaluated in much the same way that Freud reevaluated transference. It is my view that Freud actually wrote about what we now call implicit memory knowledge without grasping that, like transference, acting out was not an obstacle, if understood by the analyst, but another “powerful ally” for communicating emotional memory that had no words. Freud’s comments in “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” indicate that acting out is regarded as “yielding to the compulsion to repeat, which now replaces the impulsion to remember” . He continues: “The part played by resistance, too, is easily recognized. The greater the resistance the more extensively will acting out (repetition) replace remembering.”He writes that he would prefer his patients to remember in “the old manner” , a rueful reference to the fact that memories recalled under hypnosis were less stormy! “Doing something” appeared to be the only access to memory that the patient had. We now know that expressing feelings, sometimes through action, is the only way that a patient can express some part of a memory whose explicit component had not registered because of neurological immaturity or, as in a child of twoand- a-half or three-and-a-half, only in a fragmentary way. So the affective component is struggling for expression in the absence of any temporal or contextual signature from the hippocampus that might have indicated that the experience belonged to the past and not to the here and now. The archaeology of the mind knows nothing of carbon dating! Because Freud was unaware of unconscious material that was not repressed, he assumed that acting out was a way of remembering when what was forgotten had been repressed.

Fifty years later, acting out was still no ally. Greenson writing in 1974 described acting out under the heading of Transference Resistances and ends this section of his book by pointing out that when the reenactment is ego-syntonic “it is then always more difficult to enlist the patient’s reasonable ego, to establish a working alliance and to uncover or re-construct the underlying memories”.

Acting out as described by both authors is more like a battle ground! Here is Freud again: “If . . . the transference becomes hostile or unduly intense and therefore in need of repression, remembering at once gives way to acting out . . . The patient brings out of the armoury of the past the weapons with which he defends himself against the progress of the treatment– weapons which we must wrest from him one by one” .

Although Freud ascribes acting out to the repression of memory in this paper , what is most intriguing is that he makes connections  between screen memories, childhood amnesia, and internal psychical processes; he then writes: “In these processes it particularly often happens that something is ‘remembered’ which could never have been ‘forgotten’ because . . . it was never conscious.” Immediately following these remarks, and we will return to them shortly, he associates to “one special class of experiences of the utmost importance for which no memory can, as a rule, be recovered. These are experiences which occurred in very early childhood and were subsequently understood and interpreted. One gains knowledge of them through dreams.”

It is my view that Freud is here trying to understand the difference between the forgetting of what we would now call declarative events and nondeclarative events. Hence he writes that the forgetting of impressions, scenes, and experiences “nearly always reduces itself to shutting them off ” .However,with internal processes of reference, emotional impulses, and thought connections, “in these processes it particularly often happens that something is ‘remembered’ which could never have been ‘forgotten’ because . . . it was never conscious.” This then is a description of nonrepressed memory. It becomes even clearer if we reverse the direction of the “psychical apparatus”  from “regression” to “progression”: we are now considering remembering. Freud’s passage now reads: “It particularly often happens that something is ‘forgotten’ which could never have been ‘remembered’ because it was never conscious.” This then is a very clear description of what the author understands by implicit memory, that is to say emotional memory with priming. It might be said, too, that priming and Freud’s screen memories have common ingredients!

The essential point here is that Freud identifies two different processes for remembering and forgetting internal and external “events.” Internal and external acts “must,” he writes, “in their relation to forgetting and remembering, be considered separately” . Furthermore, he writes about the internal acts that it makes “no difference whatever whether such a thought connection was conscious and then forgotten or whether it never managed to become conscious at all. The conviction which the patient obtains in the course of his analysis is quite independent of this kind of memory” . In modern parlance Freud is saying that declarative “events” are forgotten by pushing them out of the mind (Freud says “shutting them off ”)–suppressing, not repressing, them–whereas nondeclarative “events” are “constructed” and it matters not to the patient whether they were once conscious or not.

Though Freud never produced a complete theory of memory, in this remarkable paper we see how neuroscientific ideas have brought to life the careful and truthful observations of a pioneer thinker.

Emotional memory is the conditioned learning of emotional responses to a situation and is mediated by the amygdala. The emotional memory representations are thought to be stored separately from the factual details of the events.

For more than 20 years, there has been a suspicion that the brain structures that support implicit memory are in place before the systems needed for explicit memory . This is based on the fact that the human hippocampus, necessary for processing explicit memory, is immature at birth and for the first 2 years of life, while the amygdala and basal ganglia, necessary for processing implicit emotional memory, are well developed at birth. From this the conclusion has been drawn that implicit memory is impaired in the early years of childhood.Weiskrantz  suggested that implicit memory may be encoded and retained from infancy, in contrast to explicit memory, which does not become durable until 3 or 4 years of age.

Though Shacter [20] was moved to write that the symptoms of the hysteric patients studied by Freud and Breuer “are plagued by implicit memories of events they cannot remember explicitly,” both neuroscience and psychoanalysis preferred to make what they could of the undeniable nonconsciousness of procedural memory rather than pursuing the more speculative route that suggests that emotional memory is represented much earlier than explicit memory. From the neuroscientific point of view this is understandable as a reliable research project to demonstrate this proposition faces enormous difficulties, not least because the orbitofrontal control system which plays an essential role in the regulation of emotion matures in the middle of the 2nd year, at which time theaverage child has a productive vocabulary of less than 70 words.

Procedural memory is for motor, perceptual, and cognitive skills and habits . Sometimes called “skill and habit” memory, procedural memory is typified by the acquisition of a motor skill, such as playing the ;piano, which, after many repetitions, becomes automatic. Once a skill has become a routine or a habit it can be downloaded to other brain systems including the basal ganglia, the motor cortex, and the cerebellum, where it is processed unconsciously . A skill that has become “second nature” no longer requires diligent cortical monitoring. So here we have a memory process, once declarative–originally you have to learn consciously and remember that Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit–that eventually becomes automatic. This might be compared to our split perceptual system which enables us to react to danger immediately, bypassing the cortex, thereby eliminating consciousness from the evasive action, or, if the danger is less threatening, the situation is thought out and a plan of action instigated in conscious awareness. Procedural memory and both aspects of our split perceptual system would be employed by a pilot landing a stricken aircraft.

In my view, the mise en scène and nature of procedural memory hardly fit it for the roles that have been ascribed to it by many psychoanalysts. It has become overloaded with significance that it does not warrant. The over-working of procedural memory has restricted our awareness for the other far more important implicit memory processes such as priming, which subliminally has considerable impact on our thoughts and behavior, and of course–and most important of all for psychoanalysis–emotional memory. It is certainly true that procedural memory and knowledge are nonconsciously processed, but it is not conscious in a very different sense from the way that mental contents that have been repressed are unconscious, or in a very different sense from the way that material that is not available to consciousness because of the neurological immaturity of parts of the brain (the hippocampus in particular) is not conscious. As procedural memory was the first unconsciously processed memory to be described by neuroscience, this feature of manifest “simple” nonconsciousness made it an attractive arena for theorizing. Psychoanalysis was excited too about the concept, because hitherto “unconscious” had meant Freud’s dynamic, repressed unconscious, and
here was a nonconscious mental process that was not repressed. Its formation from explicit activity is as devoid of affect as is the nonconscious memory that results, and perhaps, like semantic memory, its durability has something to do with its somewhat mechanical if not alexithymic nature! There is no autobiographical content and “it does not involve representations of an individual’s internal states”. It is understandable
why the term “procedure” lends itself to improvisation and particularly to a way of consolidating early relationships and experiences which become habits, the “way we see things,” which then become part of our character and influence the way we relate to others as adults. I do not disagree with the content of this sequence, but I do not believe that procedural memory “shoulders” this process. It is too one-dimensional both as memory and knowledge: it short-circuits the complexities of the interactions between all the memory systems, implicit and explicit, which bring versions of the past via many different neuronal pathways into the consulting room. Freud himself believed that a person’s “character” is based on the memory traces of our impressions but not, in my view, as Grigsby and Hartlaub theorize, mediated by procedural memory. Inevitably procedural processes play some part in consolidating repetitive learning where coordinating and motor components are involved, but these would more frequently occur in older children and adults. Ryle makes the point that there is a crucial difference between the procedures developed to manage physical skills and those concerned with human relationships, and that this difference is the presence of another person and another mind. I do not know whether neuroscience can accommodate that crucial difference; I don’t think psychoanalysis can.

The work of Stern et al. on “implicit relational knowing” and their conclusions that “the process of rendering repressed knowledge conscious is quite different from that of rendering implicit knowing conscious” is no less valid because they regard implicit and procedural knowledge synonymously, but I do think it is curious that in the intimate settings of mother with child and therapist with patient, the vehicle hypothesized to carry the subtle affective nuances of the “proto-conversation” between mother and child and the affective immediacy of the “now” moments between patient and therapist should be a memory process that is without affect! In my view, the “something more” than interpretation would be greatly enhanced in their theory of implicit relational learning if implicit in this context meant unconscious emotional knowledge, supported by priming; and the habituation, now theorized as procedures, involved all memory systems, simple associative learning and classical conditioning.

I want to examine briefly what psychoanalysis has made of the nonconsciously processed aspects of the new memory typology.

Psychoanalysis has tended to lump together that version of the new memory typography which regards implicit memory as being the same as, and confined to, procedural memory, rather than regarding procedural memory as a category of implicit memory along with priming and emotional memory. For example, Ross  confirms my impression when he writes: “When all is said and done, for the time being, I will tend to stick to our current psychoanalytical convention and use the term ‘procedural’ to refer to implicit memory even though some cognitive scientists will see this as overinclusive.” Other authors, for example Fonagy , Levin , and Target , refer to “procedural or implicit memory” as if they were interchangeable. Fonagy goes some way towards explaining why he regards them this way in a footnote where he writes: “from the therapeutic perspective, awareness of an active and passive mode of remembering should suffice.” Though the terminology in psychoanalysis is much less important than the ideas conveyed, I regard this interchangeability as a confusion of species with genus.

I want now to turn to the topic of memory, and more particularly to nonconsciously processed memory, a field in which cooperation between the neurosciences and psychoanalysis had stimulated so many theories and ideas particularly in the “nonverbal” realms of psychoanalysis.

Even though the idea cannot be explained that this neurosciences “discovered” subconscious storage, the newest typology presented empirical validation involving just what was prolonged recognized phenomenologically by simply psychoanalysis, that is which commemorative functions had a large part for you to enjoy with being familiar with extremely charged transference allergic reactions as well as other experiential situations beyond the transference.

By the 1980s there was a proliferation in the discovery of memory systems, and in particular Cohen and Squire had differentiated procedural memory from declarative memory, thus providing the first formal description of a nonconsciously processed memory system. In 1984 Peter Graf and Daniel Shacter realized that to avoid confusion in the nomenclature, a new typology was required. They came up with the term “explicit memory” for consciously processed declarative memory–which had been subdivided into “episodic” and “semantic” by Tulving in 1972–and “implicit memory” for all forms of nonconsciously processed memory including procedural, emotional, and priming. Priming operates “invisibly” in our minds by influencing our memory as a result of prior exposure to events, ideas, and perceptions. Schacter writes interestingly about priming and plagiarism.

Professor Jaak Panksepp (behavioral neuroscientist); Professor Mark Solms (neuroscientist and psychoanalyst). Both agree that neuroscience and psychoanalysis in collaboration are not in the business of proving Freud right or wrong but of simply finishing the job that he began more than a hundred years ago.

Arnold Goldberg (psychoanalyst) : “There is no gap between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. They are separate worlds”.

Mortimer Ostow (neurologist, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst) : “It may be that psychoanalysis will survive only as a component of neuropsychoanalysis and as a component of general psychiatry . . . But I don’t think it [psychoanal] will remain as a separate discipline.”

Andre Green (psychoanalyst) : “The relation between neurology and psychical activity is not direct. The only suggestion I have for expanding the debate between psychoanalysis and neuropsychology is the creation
of discussion groups wherein psychoanalysts report a series of sessions and ask scientists for their interpretation . . . . One must admit that a Shakespearean quotation can be more enlightening for a psychoanalyst than a ton of scientific literature!”