Memory Systems and the Psychoanalytic Retrieval of Memories of Trauma

Abstract

Increasingly, psychoanalysis has confronted the issue of recovered memories of childhood trauma. Based on trauma research, the concept of a special traumatic memory has evolved. Overwhelming psychic experience is thought to generate a defensively altered state of consciousness (specifically dissociation), which encodes memory in unassimilated visual, somatic, and behavioral, rather than linguistic modes. Analytic reevocation and interpretation of the original altered states of consciousness then permits the transformation of "early" traumatic memory into "later" explicit memory. Examined from the vantage point of contemporary cognitive research and theory, underlying flaws may be found in these propositions when they are extended to patients without explicit memory of trauma: first, dissociation is a chameleonlike process, perhaps as closely associated with suggestibility as with trauma; second, state-dependent learning does not adequately account for the absence of explicit memory; and third, implicit memory does not map onto explicit memory in any direct or simple fashion. Consequently, the clinical application of current propositions about traumatic memory to patients without explicit memory of trauma may warrant considerable caution. Provisional guidelines are offered for estimating the validity of retrieved memories of trauma.

The expulsion of evil and its return: An unconscious fantasy associated with a case of mass hysteria in adolescents

“…These girls’ psyches preserve unconscious traumatic memories of damage to the body. Children attacked physically or sexually are known to dissociate these traumatic events, which remain in memory on an unconscious level (Adolphs et al ., 1995; Brenneis, 1996; Breuer and Freud, 1893). With a vivid, threatening stimulus, such as a curse associated with the Devil, in a split Catholic context and in conditions of such abandonment, a curse on the body may reactivate the bodily unconscious memory of this infantile damage and facilitate a return of this traumatic memory to the body only on the level of sensations, where it persists in a dissociated state and promotes the appearance of a clinical picture of conversion.…”

Trauma and traumatic neurosis: Freud’s concepts revisited

“…Andersen and Gold, 2003; Boulanger, 2002a; I. Brenner, 2001; Brenneis, 1996; Bucci, 2003; Davies and Frawley, 1994; Grand, 2003a; Varvin, 2003), although they do not say how dissociation exactly comes about. The operation responsible for such dissociation establishes that traumatic experiences have to be left behind at the developmental stage of hallucinatory wish‐fulfilment if mental life is to be restored.…”

Du Bois on Trauma: Psychoanalysis and the Would-Be Black Savant

“…See recent issues of Diacritics, Cultural Critique, and Postmodern Culture for a brief overview of the range of these studies. See also LaCapra (1998); Herman (1992); Davis (1994); Felman and Laub (1991); Bronfen (1998);Brenneis (1996); Leys (2000); Caruth (1995Caruth ( , 1996and Hacking (1995).…”