Best Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis

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.