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A Psychoanalytic View of Memory in the Light of

Recent Cognitive and Neuroscience Research
a

Howard Shevrin Ph.D.

a

University of Michigan Medical Center

Published online: 09 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Howard Shevrin Ph.D. (2002) A Psychoanalytic View of Memory in the Light of Recent Cognitive and
Neuroscience Research, Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 4:2,
133-140, DOI: 10.1080/15294145.2002.10773390
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133

A Psychoanalytic View of Memory in the Light of Recent

Cognitive and Neuroscience Research

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Howard Shevrin, Ph.D. (University of Michigan Medical Center)

In this paper I will be addressing two questions on

memory within the context of psychoanalytic
theory and practice while drawing upon recent
research from cognitive psychology, cognitive
neuroscience, and some of our own research on
unconscious processes:
1.
2.

Is it possible to distinguish veridical from

constructed or false memories?
What role does consciousness play in memory formation and retrieval?

I will rst briey discuss the role of memory in

psychoanalytic theory, and then consider each of
the two questions in the light of current memory
research that Tulving, Squire, and Schacter and
Loftus, among others, have so fruitfully explored.
Then I will oer quite tentatively a dierent view
of memory.
A Brief Discourse on Memory in Current
Psychoanalytic Theory
It is a well known story that Freud originally
believed that hysterical symptoms were caused by
childhood sexual abuse. He presented a series of
cases to his medical colleagues in which he felt he
had identied this early traumatic cause in a series
of cases. An actual experience repressed because
of its traumatic nature at some point caused a
variety of neurotic symptoms. Once the traumatic
memory was recovered the symptoms disappeared. A brief case illustration of this is found
in The Studies on Hysteria (1895). While on
vacation and having just sat down to rest after a
climb, Freud was approached by a young woman
who had learned that he was a doctor. She desired
his help with symptoms that constituted in

Paper presented at the Society for Neuro-Psychoanalysis

Conference on Memory, Academy of Medicine, New York City,
Saturday, April 21, 2001.

Freud's mind a state of anxiety in which she

experienced shortness of breath caused she felt by
the sensation of something crushing her chest. In
the course of a brief conversation, the young
woman, Katharina, recalled several instances of
sexual abuse some years before at the hands of
her father. Following the recall of the abuse her
anxiety symptoms abated.
This early account answers the two questions
unambiguously: the veridical recall of an actual
experience resulted in a cure. The memory was
conscious at the time the event occurred and was
ultimately recalled consciously. In the interim it
was presumably repressed. Its neurotic eects
took the form of an anxiety attack in which
elements of the traumatic event were embedded.
In current terminology, these eects would be
referred to as ``implicit.'' However, these implicit
eects were caused by a conscious, episodic or
autobiographical memory, an issue I will return
to later.
In the case of Elizabeth von R., also reported
in The Studies on Hysteria, the eects of the
repressed memory were more complex. The
memory that emerged in the course of treatment
was of a visit to her sister's deathbed. Her sister's
husband stood nearby toward whom she felt a
longstanding unrequited and shameful love. The
thought then crossed her mind that once her sister
died, her brother-in-law would be free, a thought
that was immediately repressed. But thereafter
pains in her legs made it hard for her to walk and
she became a recluse. After the memory was
unearthed, the patient realized with Freud's help
that her symptom was intended to keep her from
ever going out to meet a potential husband, a
tting punishment for someone with such awful
desires experienced just as her sister was dying.
Some time later Freud reported with satisfaction
that he saw her dancing at a ball.
Here the relationship between the memory, a
thought or fantasy expressing a forbidden wish in
a setting that could only magnify its shameful

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134
character, and the symptom was more complex
insofar as it reected a punishment and an
inhibition. Otherwise the two questions are
answered in much the same way. A memory of
a real event, once repressed gave rise to symptoms
that were alleviated once the memory became
conscious and its relationship to the symptom
appreciated. In this instance, the symptom
contained no clear implicit derivatives of the
memory; rather the symptom was a conversion
based on an implicit knowledge of the forbidden
wish that had to be inhibited and the person
possessing the wish punished.
A thought expressing a forbidden wish that
must be disavowed takes us one step closer to the
next fateful step Freud took when he theorized
that a fantasy alone no matter its setting could
cause a neurosis once repressed. The fantasy had
that power because it embodied a powerful desire,
as in the case of Elizabeth von R., a desire that as
long as it persisted was a continuing threat to her
view of herself as someone who loved her sister
and would be true to her memory. In later theory
it would be surmised that the incestuous desire
toward her sister's widower borrowed its strength
from the more deeply repressed desire for her
father.
The two questions would now be answered
somewhat dierently: the memory need not be of
a trauma, nor need it be a memory in the usual
sense, but a fantasy formed out of reactions to
real events that drew upon already existing
unacceptable wishes which had to remain ungratied and thus unconscious. Indeed it is
possible within this account for the entire process
to occur unconsciously. Elizabeth von R. need
not have had a conscious thought or fantasy at
her sister's deathbed; it all could have been
experienced unconsciously and the neurotic eects
might have been the same. The unconscious
fantasy would need to have been re-constructed
in the course of treatment inferentially from a
number of dierent avenues of evidence, generally
derived from transference enactments, and if
common analytic experience is any guide, would
likely have led back to conscious childhood
experiences with her father, not necessarily
traumatic. Seldom, I might add, is there the
opportunity for independent corroboration of
these constructions. Analyst and patient must rest
content with probabilities that make sense.
For these and other reasons, a number of
analysts like Gill, Homan, and others have
opted for a position in which it does not matter
whether what the patient recalls is veridical or
not. What matters is the coherent account
creating by the collaboration of patient and

Howard Shevrin
analyst that results in a meaningful narrative
making sense of the patient's life. From this point
of view, the question of what is veridical and what
is constructed is answered simply: it is all
constructed. Moreover, it does not matter to the
success of the treatment whether the veridical and
constructed elements are disambiguated.
From a cognitive science and neuroscience
perspective this is all terribly complicated and
more than a little bewildering. How to make sense
of this in simpler, more operational terms, based
less on complex inferences and capable of being
independently corroborated?
Let us turn to the rst question:
1.

Is it possible to distinguish between veridical

and constructed or false memories?

The answer to this question has not only

theoretical import, but as has been demonstrated
in recent times can have grave legal consequences.
The question can be rephrased more usefully as
follows: when does a report of an event accord
with the memory trace left by the event, and does
that report in turn change the memory trace so
that with each new report the memory trace itself
changes so that one can no longer talk of a
canonical memory of the event, but only of a
constructed memory trace changing with each
recall? Those who favor a constructivist position
in psychoanalysis would anticipate a positive
answer to the question.
And indeed much evidence has been adduced
by Loftus (Loftus and Loftus, 1980) and others
that appears to support this position. They have
found that memory is remarkably inuenced by
suggested misinformation and that it may indeed
be the case that the memory trace is changed by
the misinformation so that it is never the same
again. McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985) have
disputed the Loftus nding on the basis of results
strongly suggesting that the misinformation will
certainly inuence the memory report but does
not necessarily change the memory trace. The
basic design is to rst demonstrate that the
inuence of misinformation is present in the
initial report and then to demonstrate that a
subsequent report will show that the memory
trace has not changed. The original Loftus
research procedure had three steps: 1) a videotape
viewed by the subject would contain a hammer, 2)
subsequent to viewing the videotape the subject is
given a misleading narrative of the video narrative so that a screwdriver is mentioned and not a
hammer, 3) in the test situation the subject is
asked if the tool was a hammer or a screwdriver.
A signicant number of subjects as compared to
controls choose the screwdriver. McCloskey and

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A Psychoanalytic View of Memory

Zaragoza added one step: 4) subjects were then
given a second choice, that between hammer and
wrench. If the misinformation had changed the
memory trace then subjects would guess that
hammer and wrench were equally likely since
screwdriver had presumably replaced hammer in
the memory trace. But subjects choose hammer
signicantly above chance so that it would appear
that the misinformation had not changed the
memory trace.
It is of interest that in their reply to the
McCloskey and Zaragoza ndings, Loftus,
Schooler and Wagenaar (1985) conclude, in a
spirit with which psychoanalysts can sympathize,
that ``. . . it is currently impossible to get inside of
subjects' heads and see how their memories are
actually represented. Instead we must rely on
indirect inferences based on subjects' reports of
what they recall'' (p. 379). I don't believe that
McCloskey and Zaragoza would disagree with
this, although they might still insist that it is
possible to infer from their ndings that the
memory trace had not changed.
In point of fact it has become possible to ``get
inside of subjects' heads'' and to show that there
is a dierence between a false report and a true
memory. In a fascinating study, Fabiani, Stadler,
and Wessels (2000) have demonstrated that a
brain dierence exists between false and true
memories regardless of the subject's report. Their
study is based upon what is perhaps the most
surere way of creating false memories in the
laboratory developed by Roediger and McDermott
(1995). One simply has subjects read a list of
words such as DOOR, GLASS, PANE, SHADE,
LEDGE, SILL, HOUSE, OPEN, CURTAIN,
FRAME, VIEW, BREEZE, SASH that are all
associates of the unlisted word WINDOW. When
subjects are asked later on to recognize words
from the list they will erroneously recognize
WINDOW as having been on the list. Subjects
will express the same condence in WINDOW as
they do in the other actually presented words.
The intriguing manipulation Fabiani et al.
(2000) introduced was to present the list in the
study period to either the left or right side of the
brain in a counterbalanced order. The test words,
however, were presented foveally. They easily
replicated the Roediger and McDermott ndings:
about 70% of the time subjects reported that
words like WINDOW had been on the list, no
dierent from the percentage reported for words
that had in fact been on the list. But event-related
potentials collected from each side of the brain
separately told a dierent story: The true
memories showed greater activation on the side
to which they had been presented, while the false

135
memories activated both sides of the brain
equally. The authors concluded that true memories leave a ``sensory signature,'' while false
memories do not. This makes evident good sense.
The true memories were actually experienced as
perceptions; sensory activation was present at the
time. This was not the case for the false memories.
In the case of true memories, activation of the
memory trace included a memory of a perception.
To return to the McCloskey and Zaragoza
experiment, when hammer and wrench were
presented in the fourth step, only hammer
activated a ``sensory signature'' thus favoring its
choice and indicating that the misinformation,
screwdriver, had never been experienced perceptually and had not changed that aspect of the
memory trace. The Fabiani et al., research
demonstrates that it is possible to go beyond the
limits of report and to ``get into subjects'' heads.''
The intriguing question raised by the Fabiani
research, and one that analysts would have a
particular interest in answering, is why the
information distinguishing the true from false
memory is not used.
There is also convergent evidence in the
cognitive literature supporting the Fabiani nding. Mather, Henkel, and Johnson (1997), using
the same Roediger paradigm for creating false
memories, found that accounts of false memories
had less auditory detail and less remembered
feelings and reactions than accounts of true
memories. Similarly, in an earlier study, Schooler,
Gerhard, and Loftus (1986) reported that descriptions of false memories were longer and more
qualied, with more reference to cognitive operations, and contained fewer sensory details. They
also reported that judges could be trained to
dierentiate between true and false memories by
instructing them to use these criteria. This nding
should be of special interest to clinicians. The
``sensory signature'' identied by Fabiani accords
well with the emphasis in these two studies on
auditory and sensory detail.
The answer to rst question can now be
given: it is possible to distinguish between true
and false memories objectively on the basis of
brain and cognitive studies. Misinformation
causing misreporting does not necessarily change
the memory trace itself. Moreover, the memory
trace of a real event is marked by sensory and
perceptual features missing in the false memory
report. It is also possible to train people so that
they can distinguish true from false memories.
There is one last consequential inference we can
draw from these results: if others can detect true
from false memories on the basis of a ``sensory
signature,'' or the presence of sensory experience,

136

Howard Shevrin

then so can the person possessing the memory.

We can make discriminations among our own
memories and we do so quite frequently; the
intriguing question is why we fail to do so.
Psychoanalysts maintaining a constructivist
position can take little comfort from these
ndings, although they might still insist that
discriminating between veridical and constructed
memories may have little bearing on the outcome
of the treatment.
I turn next to the second question.

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2.

What role does consciousness play in memory

formation and retrieval?

A widely accepted typology has emerged out

of recent memory research contributed by Tulving,
Squire and Schacter among others that ascribes
dierent roles to consciousness depending on the
type of memory. Although dierent terms are
used by dierent investigators, they generally
refer to the same phenomena. Following Squire
(1987), I will distinguish between declarative and
non-declarative memory. Declarative memory is
further subdivided into episodic and semantic
memory. Episodic, or autobiographical memory,
refers to what we ordinarily mean by memory-the
conscious recall of a conscious experience identied by place, time, and personal experience,
hence autobiographical. The term episodic is
intended to convey that the memory is of a
discrete event. Semantic memory refers to knowledge abstracted from numerous individual instances experienced in the past as in the learning
of language, hence semantic memory. Nondeclarative memory refers to memories of repeated sequential actions that have become
automatized so that one can perform the actions
without awareness. The term used is procedural
memory to convey that a sequential series of steps
is generally involved. We learn about procedural
memory not through the usual methods of recall
or recognition that elicit autobiographical memories but by their implicit (non-conscious) inuence on some current performance. This inuence
is referred to as priming. According to this
typology, epidosic or autobiographical memories
are formed consciously and retrieved consciously.
Procedural memories are initially formed consciously, but gradually become automatized or
non-conscious and reveal their presence by
implicit, non-conscious inuences on some current behavior. The term implicit generally refers
to the non-conscious retrieval of a procedural
memory. The complementary term, explicit, refers
to the conscious recall or recognition of an
autobiographical or episodic memory. When a
non-declarative memory inuences a current

performance it is referred to as primingthe

non-declarative memory primes, that is, eects a
current performance in some way. Non-declarative memories may also reveal themselves through
associations, or through classical delay conditioning, but not through so-called trace conditioning. More of this later. In all of these
retrievals of non-declarative memories, the common denominator is the absence of awareness of
the retrieval. The memory inuences remain
implicit, or non-conscious.
These distinctions have been succinctly
summarized by Kandel (1998) in his paper on A
New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry published in the American Journal of Psychiatry:
. . . memory is not a unitary function of mind but
has at least two forms, called explicit and
implicit: a memory for what things are as
compared to a memory for how to do something.
Explicit memory encodes conscious information
about auto-biographical events and factual
knowledge. It is a memory about people, places,
facts, and objects, and it requires for its
expression the hippocampus and the medial
temporal lobe. Implicit memory involves for its
recall an unconscious memory for motor and
perceptual strategies. It depends on the specic
sensory and motor systems as well as on the
cerebellum and the basal ganglia [p. 468].

Kandel then states that these ndings ``bear

no resemblance to Freud's unconscious. It is not
related to instinctual strivings or to sexual
conicts, and the information never enters consciousness.'' He believes that these ndings
``. . . provide the rst challenge to a psychoanalytically oriented neural science. Where, if it
exists at all, is the other unconscious?'' (p. 468).
This challenge is of course meant to energize
research among psychoanalytically oriented investigators. After reading the Kandel article, I
was suciently energized to submit a letter that
was published in a subsequent issue of the same
journal (Shevrin, 1999) briey summarizing research that begins to meet that challenge and
pointing out some problems with the memory
typology advanced by Kandel, focussing on the
role of consciousness. In what follows I will be
expanding on that letter, drawing mainly on our
own research.
I will rst discuss the relationship of
consciousness to explicit episodic memory and
the role of the hippocampus in explicit episodic
memory. This issue does have some important
bearing on what is re-enacted in the transference,
a point I will return to shortly. Clark and Squire
(1998) advanced the thesis based on a series of

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A Psychoanalytic View of Memory

conditioning studies that consciousness was necessary for establishing trace conditioning, but not
delay conditioning. In trace conditioning there is
a time interval between the conditioned stimulus
and the unconditioned stimulus, while in delay
conditioning the two stimuli overlap in time.
Clark and Squire reasoned that the time interval
between the conditioned and unconditioned
stimulus true for trace conditioning made it
necessary for the memory of the conditioned
stimulus to form a trace that remains active so
that it could then be related to the unconditioned
stimulus. Their ndings appeared to demonstrate
that in normals trace conditioning occurred only
when subjects were aware of the relationship
between the conditioned and unconditioned
stimulus. In amnesiacs suering from hippocampal damage trace conditioning could not be
established, but delay conditioning could presumably because no formation of a conscious
memory and awareness of a relationship were
necessary.
The potential importance of this nding was
underscored by Schacter in the same issue of
Science in which the Clark and Squire article
appeared. Schacter (1998) suggested that this
dierence in the role of consciousness between
trace and delay conditioning could be used as a
marker for consciousness in animals. If an animal
demonstrated that it could learn under conditions
of trace conditioning it could be assumed that the
animal was conscious and presumably was forming explicit, episodic memories.
It would follow from the Clarke and Squire
ndings, and Schacter's interpretation of their
results, that trace conditioning should not be
established in the absence of awareness. In a
study from our laboratory, Wong, Bernat, Bunce
and Shevrin (1997) demonstrated that trace
conditioning can occur with subliminal stimuli
that are clearly out of awareness. These ndings
have been further supported by more recent
ndings based on contextual learning. Chun and
Phelps (1999) have shown that contextual learning, involving the discrimination of novel from
repeated contexts, can take place in the absence of
awareness in normals. Amnesiacs with damage to
the hippocampus do not show this eect. In
evaluating the Chun and Phelps research and
other related research, Eichenbaum (1999) concluded that hippocampal involvement is a necessary but not sucient condition for forming a
memory in awareness: ``. . . these ndings suggest
that the hippocampus mediates the networking of
memories with or without conscious awareness,
but that one cannot have awareness of these
memories without involvement of the hippocam-

137
pus'' (p. 7). Thus it can be concluded that episodic
as well as procedural memories can form unconsciously and that some additional process
must account for consciousness in the case of
episodic memories. Consequently, consciousness
is no longer tenable as a criterion distinguishing
declarative autobiographical or episodic memory
from non-declarative procedural memory.
Can unconscious episodic memories prime
implicitly, that is, have unconscious eects on
subsequent stimuli similar to the eects of
procedural memories? There is some evidence
for this in another conditioning study conducted
by Wong, Shevrin, and Williams (1997) in which
this time trace conditioning was established
consciously but its eects were studied unconsciously. The memory of the previously consciously conditioned relationship between the
conditioned and unconditioned stimulus was
now activated unconsciously by presenting the
conditioned stimulus subliminally. At this point
in the experiment one could say that an episodic
memory was activated unconsciously. Once activated there was brain evidence that an expectation had been aroused in anticipation of the
unconditioned stimulus (a mild shock) that would
ordinarily soon follow as in the previous conditioning series, but in fact did not. It is well
established than an expectation of a stimulus will
facilitate the response to that stimulus and is thus
a forerunner of a priming eect.
There is one other strand of evidence
supporting the view that consciousness is not
necessary for episodic memory to form. We have
recently completed an anesthesia experiment in
which patients undergoing thyroidectomies were
put under general anesthesia (Bunce, Kleinsorge,
Villa, Kushwaha, Szocik, Hendriks, WimerBrakel and Shevrin, in preparation) while unconscious pairs of words were played into their ears.
The following day the experimental words and
controls were replayed and subjects were asked to
guess whether they had heard the words or not. It
had been established previously that they had no
conscious recall of anything occurring during the
actual surgery. They also failed the recognition
test. As they were listening to the word pairs brain
responses were obtained in the form of eventrelated potentials. An analysis of these ERPs
revealed that theta synchronization (slow 35
cycles per second waves) was signicantly greater
for the word pairs they had heard during
anesthesia than for the controls they did not
hear. Other research has shown that theta
synchronization is associated with the formation
of episodic memories (Klimesh, 1999). There is
also some reason to believe that this theta

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138
synchronization may be related to hippocampal
theta involved in episodic memory formation.
The evidence from our study suggests that
episodic memories can form unconsciously while
the person is under general anesthesia. There is
also evidence that some individuals show inhibition eects revealed by below chance recognition
of the experimental word pairs. These individuals
also score high on a test for repressiveness. These
results support the view that not only can
unconscious episodic memories be formed, but
that they can elicit defensive behavior, the rst
hint in all the research thus far cited of a dynamic
unconscious.
It is nevertheless the case that in the
cognitive and neuroscience research thus far cited
a dynamic unconscious involving conict over
sexual and aggressive impulses was not under
study. In psychoanalytic terms we are mainly
dealing with preconscious processes, unconscious
to be sure but not for dynamic reasons. Kandel's
challenge was addressed to the absence of
neurophysiological evidence for a dynamic unconscious. Some years prior to Kandel's challenge
we had published a study in which we had
attempted to nd just that (Shevrin, Williams,
Marshall, Hertel, Bond, and Brakel, 1992; Shevrin, Bond, Brakel, Hertel, and Williams, 1996):
Neurophysiological evidence for a dynamic unconscious. In this study, reported in preliminary
form in 1992 and subsequently reported in greater
detail and with additional ndings in 1996, we
demonstrated that brain responses in the form of
event-related potentials could provide neurophysiological markers for unconscious conict
in a group of patients suering from social
phobias. Specically, we found that words,
judged by a team of psychoanalysts to be related
to that individual's unconscious conict, when
presented subliminally elicited similar brain responses on the basis of which words could be
successfully categorized as going together. When
these same words were presented supraliminally
they elicited widely dierent brain responses so
that the words could no longer be classied as
going together. Two other convergent ndings
further claried what accounted for this discrepancy between subliminal and supraliminal brain
response. An independent measure of repressiveness correlated signicantly with the dierence
between subliminal and supraliminal brain-based
classication. The greater the repressiveness the
greater the disparity between subliminal and
supraliminal classication in favor of correct
subliminal classication. Also, when asked to
categorize the stimuli, subjects placed the unconscious conict words in signicantly more

Howard Shevrin
categories than words related to the conscious
experience of their symptom. Taken together
these ndings support the inference that some
inhibitory or repressive process was at work when
the words related to unconscious conict were
presented supraliminally.
Insofar as we are concerned with memory, it
would be useful to relate these ndings on
unconscious conict to what we have thus far
discussed about memory. First, it needs to be
noted that the stimuli selected were dierent for
each subject and were drawn from interviews in
which a full history was obtained. These words
were meaningful only to the particular subject.
For example, in one subject the clinicians decided
that the subject's relationship to a close friend,
John, gured prominently in his unconscious
conict so that John was selected as one of the
unconscious conict words. Only to this subject
would the name John have particular relevant
signicance. In this instance the clinicians selected
John on the basis of reported dreams and a
repeated pattern of interaction with John having
clear oedipal implications of which the patient
was unaware. Consciously, for him John was
simply a close friend and buddy. Was the
unconscious conictual nature of his relationship
to John formed as a procedural memory or did it
retain its episodic character? This issue is of some
importance because the thesis has been advanced
by Clyman, Fonagy and others that object
relations patterns form procedural memories
and are unconscious because they are procedural
and not because they are repressed. Through
repeated interactions with signicant others that
follow a certain regular pattern a procedural
memory is formed very much along the lines of
what happens when we learn to drive a car or
learn to type. These procedural memories are then
re-enacted in the transference, following essentially a priming model in which the current
relationship to the analyst is inuenced by these
unconscious procedural memories. Related episodic memories may emerge at the same time but
these cannot have been what was unconscious
because, according to this typology, episodic
memories form consciously and remain latent
until consciously retrieved at some later time.
From this point of view, repression of episodic
memories is unnecessary to account for transference enactments. Procedural memory can more
parsimoniously account for transference and has
the further advantage of relating to a substantial
body of supporting research.
Can our results be fully accounted for on the
basis of a cognitive procedural rather than a
conictual dynamic unconscious? There are two

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A Psychoanalytic View of Memory

ndings that would be dicult to explain in
procedural terms. When the same words bearing
for example on the subject's unconscious conict
with John are presented supraliminally it would
seem that the words should activate the procedural memory resulting from his many interactions
with John and that one would then expect some
inuence of the procedural memory on the
response to the supraliminal words as in a
priming model. Thus one would expect some
commonality among the words reected in the
brain responses. But this was not the case.
Moreover, when given the chance subjects categorize the words in dierent categories. Finally, a
procedural explanation would not explain the
correlation with repressiveness. The absence of
supraliminal brain response similarity for the
unconscious conict words, their categorization
subjectively in dierent categories, and the
correlation with repressiveness support the interpretation that we are dealing with an active
unconscious eort at inhibition and defense
rather than with a preconscious priming inuence.
Further supporting this view that a dynamic
episodic unconscious best accounts for our results
is the experimental evidence previously cited that
episodic memories can in fact form unconsciously
and can prime unconsciously, thus casting some
doubt on consciousness as the criterion for
distinguishing episodic from procedural memory.
There is a more radical view of memory that
I would like quite briey to introduce as a
potential alternative to this dual systems model.
I believe that this more radical view is more in
keeping with a psychoanalytic view of memory.
Because of time considerations, I will only be able
to present the thesis schematically, although there
is considerable research to support this view that I
will not be able to present in sucient detail. In
this view memories are laid down as individual
exemplars or instances and retain their individuality. Memories are not proceduralized in their
trace formation but are proceduralized in the
process of retrieval to accommodate some task,
context, or expectation at the time of retrieval.
Procedural memories are not inherently automatized but are subject to modication each time
they are retrieved without necessarily changing
the character of the individual instances forming
the memory. In eect this theory holds that
memory is organized on the basis of episodic
memories. This single process theory has been
advanced by Jacoby, Whittlesea and others.
There is considerable controversy in the cognitive
literature between these two dierent theories.
The nal returns are not yet in. I will conclude by
discussing why I thing the single process theory is

139
more consistent with psychoanalytic theory and
practice.
Let me start by quoting from Whittlesea
(1987):
Instead of distinguishing between information
stores that may have dierential impact on
performance, this approach emphasizes dierences in encoding and retrieval depending on
interactions of the learner's intentions and
expectations, the demand of current tasks, the
similarity of the current situation to past situations, and the nature of the materials. This
approach promises to provide an integrated
framework for understanding remembering,
attention, perception, and concept learning and
application through the common basis of the use
of memory for particular processing episodes
(italics mine) [p. 16].

Whittlesea also provides an important place

in understanding memory to unconscious expectations, which are central to his theory as well as
to psychoanalysis. On the other hand, in the dual
system theory only episodic memory involves
motivated retrieval, while procedural memory is
supposed to operate entirely automatically by
which is customarily meant that unconscious
expectations or motives do not play a role. In
procedural terms the transference reenactment
occurs because some feature of the analytic
relationship (e.g., gender, age, authority) is
suciently similar to an already laid down
procedural object relations pattern so that priming, an automatic unmotivated process, elicits the
procedural relationship pattern. In the single
process theory as exemplied in the quote from
Whittlesea, intentions and expectations in addition to context and the demands of some current
task help to determine exactly how and what will
be retrieved. Retrieval is never simply automatic
and unmotivated.
In my brief discourse on the role of memory
in psychoanalysis, the beginning of the story was
straightforward: a traumatic memory formed
consciously was repressed, produced symptoms,
and remained unchanged until nally recalled
consciously with the help of the analyst. What is
uniquely psychoanalytic is that a memory once
out of consciousness does not simply remain
latent or purely dispositional, but exerts an active
inuence on behavior and experience. In later
theory this activity is not ascribed to the memory
itself, but to the desires and wishes participating
in the formation of the memory that continue to
be active unconsciously. Moreover, memories
enter into unconscious fantasies that form out
of the encounter between desires and wishes with

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140
the real world. These latter considerations as yet
play no role in cognitive or neuroscience research.
Our eort at investigating unconscious conict
from psychodynamic, cognitive and neurophysiological perspectives remains to the best of our
knowledge an interesting but isolated instance.
We need a theory of memory in which motivational and cognitive factors can be independently
assessed and their interactions investigated. In
what way do real perceptions of signicant others
become distorted under the inuence of desires
and wishes that cannot be given expression. It is
from this point of view heartening that there is
evidence that despite suggestion and misinformation the original perceptions need not be erased;
they are retrievable once the misinformation, the
distortions, have been identied, for example, in
the transference.
In counterdistinction to the constructivist
position maintained by some psychoanalysts,
Freud (1911) conceived of neurosis as alienating
the individual from reality. He stated, ``. . . every
neurosis has as its result, and therefor probably
its purpose, a forcing of the patient out of
reality . . .'' (p. 218). We see this operative in
defenses. Repression surrenders knowledge in the
face of conict and anxiety; isolation surrenders
the natural connections between aect and
thought; projection imposes the individual's own
disavowed thought, motivation or feeling upon
another. A symptom results in an avoidance of
some piece of reality as in a phobia. The social
phobic patients in our study of unconscious
processes avoided parties, gatherings, opportunities to speak or perform, which adversely
aected their careers and futures. Neurosis
alienates the neurotic from reality not simply
from his or her version of reality. We cannot
know a projection unless we distinguish between

Daniel M. Bernstein and Elizabeth F. Loftus

it and a perception of reality shared by the rest of
us but not by the neurotic, which of course could
be any of us at any particular time. In fact, what
is often the case is that we shift our perspectives
internally all the time from neurotic distortion
one moment to realistic perception the next. To
the extent that our memories remain subject to
what we desire them to be rather than what we
perceive to be the case, we are hampered by
neurotic limitations on our ability to deal with
reality successfully. Therefore successful treatment must assist the patient to resolve neurotic
distortions of reality including neurotic distortions of reality. From this vantage point it is
not enough to help the patient arrive at a coherent
view of his or her life, free of internal contradictions, a story nally without gaps and
inconsistencies. The story must correspond to a
reality previously ignored or distorted, which
includes importantly how the reality of the
analysis has been neurotically ignored and
distorted. Again it is relevant to underscore the
ndings that memory traces need not be eaced
by distortion, but can be retrieved unchanged. A
perception leaves a ``sensory signature'' (Fabiani).
A false memory does not. Moreover, the clinician
can rely on cues revealed in the telling which
reveal whether something that happened is being
described, a perception of reality that has left a
``sensory signature,'' or whether it is a distortion
or largely a fantasy (Schooler). Research has
demonstrated that this is possible. Indeed
clinicians, as well as the rest of us, are doing
this all the time with greater or lesser success.
Freud referred to this process as reality testing,
or the totality of the means we use for determining with some probability, but no certainty,
what is true from what is false in our memories
and perceptions.

Lingering difficulties distinguishing true from false memories:

A comment on Shevrin's psychoanalytic view of memory by Daniel M. Bernstein and Elizabeth F. Loftus
(University of Washington)

Shevrin brings to bear cognitive and neuroscience

research to develop a psychoanalytic theory of
memory. Armed with this research, he argues that
it is possible to objectively distinguish true from
false memories. Indeed this purported ability is
one of the key foundations of his overall theory.
According to Shevrin, it should be possible to
locate the original (true) memory of a given

experience through a close examination of the

patient's transference. Shevrin bases this conclusion, in large part, on the behavioral work
(exemplied by studies such as Schooler, Gerhard
and Loftus, 1986) and neurophysiological work
(for example, by Fabiani, Stadler and Wessels,
2000).
Consider rst the actual behavioral data