False memories, negative affects, and psychic reality: The role of extra‐clinical data in psychoanalysis

Abstract

Psychoanalysis as a treatment originated in the idea that neurosis is related to the ways in which individual psychic reality departs from actuality. Psychic reality includes memories, beliefs and their associated affects and fantasies connected with an individual's experience of the inner and outer world. The psychoanalytic determination of what meaningful memories or beliefs are inaccurate, distorted or false ordinarily relies upon principles of intra‐clinical validation. By itself, however, intra‐clinical validation is subject to limitations and pitfalls that conviction alone about what is actual cannot circumvent. Despite this fact, there are remarkably few analytic case reports demonstrating false or signifi cantly distorted memories through the use of data obtained from outside the consulting room. This paucity of reports may be related, at least in part, to the belief that the use of extra‐clinical data is essentially unanalytic or supports resistance. Based on the views that (a) psychic reality cannot be regarded as exclusively subjective or objective but is inherently both; and that (b) a goal of analysis is to achieve a different, acceptable and more accurate view of reality, the authors report a clinical case involving a confi rmably false pivotal memory and its associated negative affects. They discuss theoretical and technical considerations in utilizing extra‐clinical data during the treatment process.

Letters to the Editors

“…A muddled transference-countertransference is hardly 'sure ground,' and 'traumatic material' generally warrants a receptive analytic attitude from the analyst, not a summary transferential interpretation. In fact, contrary to an exclusive focus on the analysis of transference-countertransference, under certain circumstances I have been in favor of prudently utilizing available extra-analytic material when it could further analytic process (Good et al, 2005).…”