IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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intended. The task of analytic work on embodied or enacted memories entails the re- transcribing of such experience into representational form (Mancia, 2006). See also separate entry ENACTMENT. c) Memory can take a hallucinatory form, manifested in dreams, daydreams, reveries and other forms of mainly sensory or pseudo-sensory experience. These experiences, too, require a thorough psychoanalytic investigation to be eventually amenable to being genuinely thought (Mancia, 2006; Papiasvili, 2016). d) Finally, memory can manifest itself in the form of memor ies i.e. narratives richly connoted with words and affects describing a past experience. Among these, one can distinguish between spontaneous “screen memories” resulting from displacement of affect, and after-the-fact “constructions” or “reconstructions” that induce a strong conviction about their truth-content, although there is never an indisputable “final version”. The concept of Nachträglichkeit is relevant to all memory’s varied forms: memory is a living system , constantly reconfiguring itself through a dialectical process of preserving the old while integrating the new. From both a neurobiological and a psychoanalytic point of view, periodic reconfiguration instantiates the very living character of memory, but it is also the locus of a struggle within the human psyche. This happens whenever memory’s active ‘imprints’ or ‘engrams’ threaten to gravely disrupt the stable memory structure of the Ego or the Self, or when that structure was so badly damaged or distorted in its growth that it cannot easily integrate new experiences and is condemned to repeating old patterns instead of introjecting or integrating new experiences. In this sense, all psychopathology can be ascribed to a difficulty in the necessary reconfiguration of memory. Clinically, psychoanalysts are constantly dealing with memory, whether in terms of recollections or of repetitions outside of any awareness that these are other ways of ‘remembering’ (Freud, 1914b). A detailed study of the matter from the standpoint of time led Scarfone (2006, 2015) to suggest that what is referred to in psychoanalysis as the patient’s ‘past’ is in reality never truly ‘past’. The non-declarative forms of memory actively press the patient towards repeating, so that, while from a 3rd person point of view they belong to a time past, in the 1st person experience, the ‘pressure’ is happening ‘now’, hence the ‘Unpast’. What repeats itself in the transference is a form of memory that was not yet captured and stabilized within the category of the past. Based on such clinical findings, Scarfone (2015) suggested a supplement to the cognitive classes of memory: While cognitive psychology distinguishes between declarative memory and non- declarative memory, the declarative memory having semantic, episodic, and autobiographical subsets, and non-declarative memory having procedural and affective components, psychoanalysis needs to approach any of these forms of memory according to whether they refer to ‘past’ or ‘unpast’ experience. While non-declarative memory is a good locus for ‘unpast’ experiences, it is important to consider that any of these forms of memory can be captive of the ‘unpast’ (e.g. temporarily forgetting a name or, at the other end of the spectrum, intrusive episodic memory of traumatic events). The ‘situated’ nature of psychoanalytic

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