Best Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis

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.