Best Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis

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.