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Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for

Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences
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Commentary by Bonnie Smolen, Ed.D.

Bonnie Smolen Ed.D.
Published online: 09 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Bonnie Smolen Ed.D. (2002) Commentary by Bonnie Smolen, Ed.D., Neuropsychoanalysis: An
Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 4:2, 142-145, DOI: 10.1080/15294145.2002.10773392
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142
Overall, we question the evidence that
Shevrin garners in support of his claim that true
and false memories are distinguishable. A closer
look at this evidence reveals that we are a long
way away from being able to accurately classify
true and false memories. We might be able to
guess whether an individual's memory report is
true or false, but we still cannot say with any
degree of certainty whether the memory is real or
illusory.

References

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Fabiani, M., Stadler, M. A., & Wessels, P. M. (2000),

True but not false memories produce a sensory

Bonnie Smolen
signature in human lateralized brain potentials.
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Schacter, D. L., Buckner, R. L., Koustaal, W., Dale,
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and illusory recognition memory: Evidence from
positron emission tomography. Neuron, 17: 267274.

Commentary by Bonnie Smolen, Ed.D.

Howard Shevrin has been among the few

farsighted psychoanalytic thinkers trying to meet
the challenge to ``withstand, absorb, and transcend'' the new conceptual waves coming from
cognitive science and neurobiology (Opatow,
1997, p. 865). While research at the interface of
psychoanalysis and neuroscience has now become
fashionable, Dr. Shevrin is among the very few
analysts who have actually mastered the conceptual and methodological terrain of neuropsychology. (See also, from very dierent
theoretical and methodological perspectives,
Bucci, 1997; Kaplan-Solms and Solms, 2000).
For decades, he has been constructing and
reporting an elegant series of experiments
designed to challenge, amplify and validate
essential tenets of both neuropsychology and
psychoanalytic theory. Of equal importance,
throughout his career, in publications on subjects
such as aect, drive, repression and memory, he
has demonstrated a long-held commitment to
rening and updating the fundamental premises
of analytic theory.
In this paper, Shevrin has gone beyond the
challenge of absorbing and responding to neurobiological and cognitive theory generated from
laboratory research to attempt to use that data to
resolve some of the current controversies over
elemental questions of clinical theory and therapeutic change, questions as basic as the importance of veridicality of memory and the lifting of
repression vs. the contemporary constructivist

emphasis on coherence in personal narrative; or

the seemingly unanswerable question, framed by
the concept of repetition compulsion, of whether
transferential enactments can represent learned
behavior scripted by procedural memory or
whether they always must be understood as the
outcome of conicted, dynamic unconscious
processes. These disputes reemerge regularly in
the history of psychoanalysis, each time in
semantic garb slightly dierent and unique to
the particular period, and they provoke often
passionate attempts to resolve them by a marshalling of clinical data. Unfortunately, clinical data
is inherently ambiguous and never seems to
resolve the arguments, which eventually quiet
themselves until they emerge a few years later
once again in new terminological dress. Instead of
once more trying to settle these perpetual questions by theoretical argument or a mobilization of
clinical evidence, Shevrin takes a very dierent
tack, apparently believing that they can be
understood, at least partially, as testable hypotheses and perhaps even resolved by laboratory
data.
Shevrin frames two fundamental questions at
the start of his paper:
1.
2.

Is it possible to distinguish veridical from

constructed or false memories? and
What role does consciousness play in
memory formation and retrieval?
In this form, these are questions for cognitive

Commentary on A Psychoanalytic View of Memory

psychology and not, strictly speaking, for psychoanalysis. For the sake of this discussion I would
like to reframe his questions from the viewpoint
of their relevance to psychoanalysis, and particularly to aspects of our contemporary theoretical debate:
1.

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:38 22 August 2014

2.

Is the lifting of repression and the recovery of

veridical memory always necessary to treat
neurosis psychoanalytically and to resolve
transference or is it sucient to establish a
coherent personal narrative? And
If laboratory data can be used to establish
the existence of a dynamic unconscious, does
the data have anything to say about whether
transference may also be based on nonconictual procedural memory, i.e., on a
non-dynamic unconscious?

I am reframing his questions this way

because I believe that the clarication of clinical
theory is fundamental to Shevrin's aims and yet
his use of laboratory data in this endeavor is
sometimes confusing. I will look at these questions one at a time and try to see how this clinical
reframing might also shed light on both the
promise and the limitations of Shevrin's method
of using experimental data to challenge or
support clinical hypotheses.
First, the question of veridicality. Contemporary constructivist theorists, from Donald
Spence to Stephen Mitchell and Irwin Homan,
have argued convincingly for both the impossibility and the irrelevance of precise, historically
accurate recall of developmental experience. This
perspective presents a serious challenge to classical psychoanalytic theory, and Shevrin makes a
strong case that experimental data support the
classical point of view. He cites the evidence for
``sensory signatures'' which accompany true
memories alongside data derived from newer
imaging techniques that indicate a dierence in
brain activation patterns that can help distinguish
true memory from false. ``It is from this point of
view heartening,'' Shevrin writes, ``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.''
The problem with this application of cognitive experimental data, it seems to me, is that it
appears to conate two very dierent aspects of
memory. One aspect is the accuracy of retention
and recall of actual perceptual experience, along
with the distortions and contamination by
suggestion to which such recall is susceptible.
The second aspect, which is much more central to

143
psychoanalytic theory and which Shevrin tends
to compound with the rst, has to do with the
distinction of internal versus external perceptions, or the analytic task of distinguishing
fantasy from reality. This is really a very dierent
problem for a theory of memory and it suggests
one of the serious limitations of the application
of experimental results to psychoanalytic theory,
whether the experiment is designed to study
accuracy in cognitive processes or in perceptual
processes.
Furthermore, the dispute about constructivism cannot really be resolved simply by
adjudicating veridicality. The constructivists are
not arguing that false memory is as valid as true
memory: they are making an argument about the
signicance of meaning and are suggesting that
so-called ``true memory'' is in fact an irreducibly
complex phenomenon. To further complicate
matters, clinical theory based on constructivism
is often seen as quite compatible with some other
streams of research in cognitive science, particularly the newer, connectionist approaches. (Olds,
1994; Westen and Gabbard, 2002, pp. 7386).
Connectionism does not see memories as discrete
entities nor even see revisions of memory as serial
retranscriptions, but rather views the mechanism
of memory as parallel distributed processing,
wherein a memory trace is never retrieved
precisely as originally represented, but is always
re-represented through partial reactivation of its
various overlapping components.
Another important psychoanalytic perspective which seems to be ignored in Shevrin's
application of experimental data has to do with
the role of development in the encoding, processing and reworking of memory. It is a truism
to say that the shape and texture of memories is
enormously inuenced by developmental factors,
including the child's state of language capacity.
(Nelson, 2000). Although Shevrin argues that the
distortions which aect the retelling of a
memory, and even the very experience of retelling, do not alter the original memory trace
itself, I believe that the eect of cognitive and
emotional development and the inevitable reconguration of memory which must occur
continuously under the inuence of constantly
evolving psychic development, are not well
addressed by his data.
This leads me to a more general caveat
regarding Shevrin's methodology, and about the
broader question of interdisciplinary research.
Following Patricia Kitcher, I would argue that the
validity of such research depends on ``the assumption that the phenomena dealt with by the dierent
disciplines are in some way interdependent''

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144
(Kitcher, 1992, p. 6). That is to say, the appearance of complementarity alone is insucient
relations between the disciplines need to be strong
enough that, at minimum, changes in the ndings
of one discipline necessitate changes in the
ndings of the second. This criterion can be
deceptively simple. Psychoanalysis in its origins
was a science which dierentiated itself from the
study of perception and cognition. Freud was
well-versed in the experiments and theorizing of
the Helmholtz school which were designed to
demonstrate and explain mistakes in perception,
knowledge and memory. (Makari, 1994). However, for Freud, psychoanalysis was not the study
of cognitive distortion, but the study of selfdeception, a study which ultimately aorded a
view of the mind of such explanatory power and
internal coherence that it stood as an independent
and irreducible science. At the center of this
theory is a view of memory as formed in the
crucible of a tenuous, prolonged developmental
process; the capacity to remember and to pass
judgment on one's memories is acquired initially
in a state of acute psychic helpless and will always
retain a certain provocative and unreliable
character.
While Freud made extensive appeals across
disciplinary lines for corroboration of his ideas
(Kitcher, 1992), and looked forward to the day
when neurobiology would be one of those
disciplines, I believe he would claim that conventional study of cognition and perception has very
little to say about the kinds of thoughts, aects
and motivations with which psychoanalysis is
most concernedand vice versa. Neuroscience is
an umbrella term embracing several very dierent
branches of research, including clinical neuropsychology, neuroanatomy, neurobiology, neurolinguistics, etc. Psychoanalysts committed to
bridging the disciplines will need to exercise great
care in distinguishing among these branches of
neuroscience so as to understand the terms under
which interdisciplinary research may proceedor
cannot fruitfully proceed, as the case may be. For
Shevrin to make a body of research that examines
conscious cognition and perception foundational
to his research on the dynamic unconscious is not
only unnecessary and distracting, it is also
potentially highly problematic.
While the experimental results on misremembering that he describes in the opening section of
his paper may be startling and provocative, in the
end, as Shevrin acknowledges, they pertain to a
kind of pre-conscious or non-conscious mentation that was never the purview of psychoanalysis. Though I'm in full agreement with the
critique of this research that Shevrin oers, I'm

Bonnie Smolen
less optimistic than he, and others (Westen and
Gabbard, 2002), that there is a natural t between
cognitive psychology and psychoanalysis or that
there is much to gain by basing research on the
dynamic unconscious on experiments on nonconscious cognition. If the two disciplines are not
truly interdependent, then to either seek support
from cognitive psychology research, or feel
required to falsify its ndings in order to validate
psychoanalytic hypotheses ultimately will lead to
conceptual confusion and theoretical stagnation,
rather than to an advance in knowledge for either
eld.
Let me now turn to the second of the clinical
controversies formulated by reframing Shevrin's
two initial questions. What are the respective
roles of declarative and non-declarative, or
procedural, memory in neurosogenesis and in
transference? What do we do with the assertion
by Peter Fonagy that transference enactment can
often be understood in terms of procedural
memory based on object relational experience
rather than as compromise formation resulting
from the dynamics of unconscious conict?
Shevrin uses his data to support the dynamic
unconscious model and by implication to suggest
that these data weigh against Fonagy's point of
view.
I strongly support Shevrin's assertion that
the neuropsychological terminology for memory
is inadequate: the dichotomies explicit/implicit,
declarative/procedural cannot be taken as exhaustively describing, either epistemologically or
psychologically, the forms or determinants of
memorythat is, neither the content and meaning of what we remember nor the mental
processes by which we form and represent our
memories. Most interesting, in this respect, is the
study in which Shevrin operationalizes psychoanalytic concepts, such as censorship, to be
employed as controlled variables in a highly
inventive experiment. It is this section of his
paper that I believe merits the close attention of
psychoanalysts and neuroscientists. He uses the
distinction between activation patterns induced
by subliminal versus supraliminal sensory input
to generate what he believes to be independent
conrmation for the phenomenon of repression.
It's just the kind of experiment that everyone has
said couldn't be designedeven ardent supporters of cross-fertilization between cognitive
science and psychoanalysis. (Westen and Gabbard, 2002, p. 57). Shevrin's results are therefore
all the more impressive and, as far as they go,
persuasive.
But Fonagy's arguments are more complex
than, and can't be dismissed quite as easily as

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Commentary on A Psychoanalytic View of Memory

Shevrin's explication suggests. Important for the
context of our discussion today is Fonagy's
contention that there are forms of knowledge
other than verbal, which are outside of awareness
and which are experienced and enacted in the
transference and which are not per se byproducts
of repression, although they may reinforce and be
reinforced by repression. These alternate modes
of non-conscious mentation, which Fonagy refers
to as procedural knowledge, are, much like the
eects of repression, developmental acquisitions,
constructed in the course of experience. They are
instantiated as unconscious aspects of self, and
can present huge obstacles to treatment as
reinforcers of defense, symptom and inhibition;
they also, in Fonagy's view, present great
opportunities for therapeutic changechange
which he believes bypasses the undoing of
repression and need never attain consciousness
to be of therapeutic benet.
From this perspective, experimental support
for the concept of repression does not exhaust the
possibilities for a theory of transference, does not
address the still unanswered questions at the heart
of the concept of repetition compulsion, and,
rather strikingly, makes no signicant contribution to a theory of psychic trauma and of
posttraumatic stress disorder. Each of these
problems seems to require something other than
the narrowest use of a dynamic unconscious
model of motivation.
The understanding of transference seems to
beg for an accounting of attachment-seeking
behavior, which is not adequately elaborated by
classical dynamic theory. The repetition compulsion has never been exhaustively explained by
dynamic theory alonewitness Freud's importation of the death instinct. Finally, the experience
of the past twenty years in working with
posttraumatic stress disorder seems to conrm
that a ``single process'' view of memory with its
implicit emphasis on the therapeutic reclaiming of
veridical memory is not adequate to an understanding of the psychopathology or the nature of
therapeutic change in this perplexing and common syndrome.
Even if you don't nd Fonagy's account
persuasive, which in fact I don't, the questions he
raises pose important challenges to the adequacy
of dynamic theory as it stands now, and point us

145
in the direction of greater elaboration and
systematizing of our concept of the dynamic
unconscious (see, for example, Schmidt-Hellerau,
2001) as well as a more consistent integration of
clinical and metapsychological points of view.
Howard Shevrin's work is thoughtful, creative, innovative and theoretically important. It
respects the need for empirical validation of
psychoanalytic hypotheses, and takes impressive
steps towards constructing experiments of genuine relevance to psychoanalysis, and towards
applying those results to clinical uncertainties.
In seeking such validation in the cognitive
psychology laboratory, however, this work carries
the risk of misapplication of conceptual inference
across disciplinary lines.

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