Some findings on implicit memories.
Between the empirical and the clinical approach.
45th International Congress
REMEMBERING, REPEATING AND WORKING THROUGH
Berlin, 25th July 2007
Marina Altmann de Litvan
Uruguayan Psychoanalytic Association
Memory in Psychoanalysis
• The Freudian unconscious emerges as a system with its contents, its rules, its logic. It’s completely autonomous from consciousness, from which is separated by the barrier of repression.
• Remembering is a core concept for psychoanalytic theory and practice. (Amnesia, Mnemic traces, Naschtraglisch)
• For Freud the conscious discourse is incomplete, it has gaps, it can be broken and loose its linear logic.
• Imagination permits the permeation of the true words: the unconscious.
• This perspective emphasizes the narratives, memories and infantile aspects of the patient’s history.
• For Bion (1970, 1977) the analyst should work without memory, nor wish, nor comprehension. Analysis is a unique emotional experience: it’s experienced, not only listened nor talked.
• Dreamlike remembering. The time of analysis is the present.
Previously treated as:
• one-dimensional structure
• dependent on neural maturity
• defined by the ability to give verbal accounts of past events
(Moscovitch, 1984; Nelson, 1994; Nelson & Ross, 1980; Rovee-Collier, 1997; Share, 1994),
Memory involve two “neurologically and functionally distinct” systems (Gaensbauer, 1995)
• Implicit/non-declarative
• Explicit/ declarative memory systems
These findings had provided conceptual and empirical support for the fundamental importance of implicit mental models and relational experience within the psychoanalytic area.
Adult neuroscience and infant research confirm the separate and dissociable status of conscious symbolized knowledge and nonsymbolized implicit or procedural knowing throughout the lifespan.
• Is thought to operate automatically and unconsciously
• Appears to begin in utero (Brazelton, 1992) and is clearly operative at birth
• Registers sensory, behavioral, emotional information that may be stored permanently (Howe, Courage, & Peterson, 1996; Siegel, 1996; Squire, 1987; Tulving, 1985)
Procedural learning often occurs at a subliminal or unconscious level of awareness yet can begin with explicit declarative focus (e.g., tennis strokes or direct prohibitions and admonitions) and gradually become procedural knowledge (Fossaghe, James)
Implicit processing occurs at what Stolorow and Atwood (1992) call the prereflective unconscious level, to be differentiated from Freud’s conceptualization of the dynamic unconscious that involves repressive forces
Different brain systems involved in Procedural memory:
• Priming, or recognition of recently encountered stimuli, is a function of sensory cortices;
• The acquisition of various cued feeling states involves the amygdala;
• Formation of new motor (and perhaps cognitive) habits requires the neostriatum;
• Learning new motor behavior or coordinated activities depends on the cerebellum.
Different situations and learning experiences recruit different subsets of these and other procedural memory systems, in variable combination with the explicit memory system of the hippocampus and related structures
Kandell
In procedural memory we have a biological example of one component of unconscious mental life.
How does this biologically delineated unconscious relate to Freud’s unconscious?
• Freud used the term in a strict or structural way to refer to the repressed or dynamic unconscious.
• This unconscious is what the classical psychoanalytic literature refers to as the unconscious.
• It includes not only the id but also that part of the ego which contains unconscious impulses, defences, and conflicts and therefore is similar to the dynamic unconscious of the id.
• In this dynamic unconscious, information about conflict and drive is prevented from reaching consciousness by powerful defensive mechanisms such as repression.
Two memory systems and the transference
Perceptual and declarative memory systems can be assumed to be involved in the development of transference.
• Implicit procedural memory involves the automatic stereotyped behaviour that involves long-standing characteriological patterns of unconscious defenses and unconscious internal object relations.
• Implicit declarative memory is the other component of transference and involves repressed and preconscious expectations, fantasies, and fears about how the analyst will react. (Gabbard, 2001)
Procedural memories underlie transference and defense, form early in childhood, and withstand the effects of infantile amnesia.
By recasting portions of psychoanalytic theory in terms of modern memory research, we can take a fresh look at emotions and their organization, the interpretation of transference, and the theory of therapeutic action. (Clyman, 1999)
Which psychoanalytic theories can be related to the implicit memories?
Rio de la Plata
W. y M. BARANGER
• Bi-personal phenomena.
• Analytic field
• High emotional content
• Unconscious repression of physical contact experiences.
• Moments of projective identification and projective counter identification
brief psychotherapeutic process
Research on mother-infant interaction
• 13 months girl with asthma
• naturalistic study
• Verbal and non-verbal segmentation (unit of observation: 150 words)
1) Research on mother-infant interaction
• These findings are relevant for psychoanalysis because they show the presence of two independent and different ways of processing information, both of them contributing to the outcome of the treatment.
• These two levels are continuously affecting each other: the struggle to symbolize the non verbal level can be seen as one of the major goals of psychoanalysis (Bucci, 1985, 1997) and the nature of the symbolization can then potentially affect the non verbal level.
How Implicit Mental Models Shape
Ongoing Experience
• Once implicit mental models are established, they shape ongoing experience through the use of four affective/cognitive processes:
(1) expectancies,
(2) selective attention (and selective disattention),
(3) attribution of meaning,
(4) interpersonal construction
• In other words, a patient approaches an analytic session with expectancies, selectively attends to and attributes meaning to particular cues that confirm those expectancies, and interpersonally interacts in a way that tends to elicit responses from the other that confirm the expectancies.
• Analyst and patient gradually recognize and highlight the patient’s initially unconscious (or nonconscious) patterns of organization as they emerge within the psychoanalytic encounter.
(Fosshage, 1994).
“How to do” and “how to behave” in relationships?
Psychoanalytic terms refered to established patterns of processing:
• Affective communication system.
• Complex sensorimotor coordinations (first 2 years)
• Increasingly complex affective and interpersonal coordinations that are co-constructed
• During the follow-up interviews (30 years old) it is clear to the analyst that he kept processing internally many of the issues they had worked on during his childhood analysis.
• He does not remember specific situations of that analysis – the analyst is the one who brings up the memories – but he shows how conflicts reiterate, even though he places himself in a different place with regard to them.
• He can point out differences between the way he used to be as a child and the way he is now.
• It is I who introduce specific elements of our “analytic past” – those elements associated with autobiographic memory. “When you were a child you always…” Today, when Darío talks about his current life, the words gush out, but he has a hard time connecting with his childhood. When coming back into contact with me, his lived experience of our meeting was repeated but his memories were not. Unlike his behavior in the past, now he can listen to me when I talk about certain issues and lets me intervene, but at times our meeting fails to happen.
• The analyst found that the transference scene of one session, which emerged from Darío’s screams, words and thoughts as well as from his pleasure at the sight of destruction, recurred twenty-three years later when the patient alluded to his family’s mode of relating.
• When I reread Darío’s analytic process in the light of the empirical studies conducted by Stern (1985) and Beebe & Lachmann (2002), I am struck by the fact that in the adult’s scene, it is the way of being with that is repeated in the transference.
• These ways of being with were built in his analysis when the patient was a child, and he stages the same modalities with different characters. As a child, Darío displayed his narcissism and his sexual conflicts through his games. In the adult scene his great-grandmother appears “fostering rifts,” and Darío himself, “dropping a bomb,” both images that evoke his childhood games.
• Such a mode of relating intersubjectively, which regulated our relationship, brings into play the non-symbolic representational system, one of the key contributions of research on infants (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters et al, 1978; Beebe & Lachmann, 1994; Tronick, 1989).
• This implicit knowledge operates outside focal attention and conscious experience, and is not based on language; rather, language is at its service.
• Lyons Ruth (1998) maintains that this relational knowledge contains what is known as internalized object relations.
In which ways implicit memories are repeated?
How does repetition works in the enactive procedures?
• The frequency and quality of the partner’s participation is central for elaborating intersubjective meaning (Tronick, 1998; Sander, 1995, Lyons-Ruth, 1999)
• Enactive procedures may become more coordinated, articulated, flexible, and inclusive as they are repeatedly applied, without verbal articulation of the procedure itself.
• The slow transactional process of repeated relational encounters in the psychoanalytic situation can result in increased complexity and organization in the patient’s (and analyst’s) relational procedures.(Lyons Ruth)
Emotional procedures:
• organize our emotional lives.
• organize how we interpret emotional situations and how we react emotionally to them.
• can develop without intermediate conscious declarative processing.
• when automatic, they function outside of awareness.
• develop prior to the declarative memory system in early childhood,
• are unaffected by hippocampal immaturity,
• are retained across the boundary of early childhood amnesia.
• provide organization and community in our emotional functioning across the life-span
Emotional procedures are guided by procedurally encoded heuristics which are initially adaptive but may later lead to systematic distortions in the processing of information and experience. Those procedures which are selected in development are observed as the individual’s characteristic coping strategies.
Emotions (conscious or not) may play causal roles in mental functioning due to the activation of the procedurally encoded heuristics.
Clyman, 1999
The analytic work
• How do significance systems included in the implicit relational knowing evolve and change?
• Temporal synchrony of behaviour.
• Flexible and coherent procedural patterns
• Internal object
Attachment research provides general empirical support for the psychoanalytic construct of “internalized objects” and at the same time underscore the early origins of these models in actual relational transactions.
However, “internalization” is occurring at a presymbolic level, prior to the capacity to evoke images or verbal representations of “the object.” Thus, the primary form of representation must be one, not of words or images, but one of enactive relational procedures governing “how to do,” or what Stern et al. (1998) have called “implicit relational knowing” (Lyons-Ruth, 1998).
Therapeutic work
Identifying ways of proceeding, or assumptions about others.
The complexity of the maladaptive ways of proceeding vary in their degree of:
• rage or fear,
• integration with other procedural knowings,
• effectiveness in modulating internal physiological stress responses,
• fearful or hostile interpretations of others’ behavior.
How is the functional relationship between the implicit / nondeclarative and explicit / declarative memory systems?
• The Boston Group views declarative and procedural knowing (also called enactive knowing; (Lyons-Ruth, 1999) to be separate and parallel domains, rendering declarative processing as relatively ineffective in altering procedural knowledge.
• They view procedural knowledge as represented non-symbolically and, therefore, less accessible to declarative focus (i.e., exploratory / interpretive work).
• Their delineation of the analyst’s required affective engagement has countered the classical psychoanalytic prescriptions of blank screen, anonymity, and neutrality that obstruct the analyst’s affective engagement.
• Their work further contributes to the ongoing relational field paradigm shift in psychoanalysis at large.
Bucci (1997) suggests that subsymbolic processing occurs at the implicit level and that nonverbal and verbal symbolic processing follows “processing rules that are explicit or can be made so” (p. 159).
• Central for development, “integration of functions,” and therapeutic action, in her view, is connecting nonverbal representations, in subsymbolic and symbolic formats, to language (verbal symbolic processing).
Fossaghe states that procedural knowledge can be represented through subsymbolic, imagistic symbolic, and even verbal symbolic processes.
To assume that procedural knowledge is rarely symbolically represented widens the gulf between the implicit and explicit systems and makes procedural knowledge less accessible to symbolic processing.
(infant’s prototypic images of mother and father use subsymbolic and imagistic (nonverbal symbolic) systems of processing. Dreaming uses imagistic and verbal symbolic processing to portray relational procedures involving self with other).
• I agree with Lyons Ruth (1999) in that procedural systems of relational knowing develop in parallel with symbolic systems, as separate systems with separate governing principles.
• Example: Dario
• Procedural systems influence and are influenced by symbolic systems through multiple cross-system connections, but these influences are necessarily incomplete.
• Furthermore, enactive relational knowing is grounded in goal-directed action, along with the affective evaluations guiding that action, and so is likely to exert as much or more influence on how symbolic systems are elaborated as symbolic systems exert on how relational systems are elaborated (see Anderson, 1982; Schacter and Moscovitch, 1984; Damasio, 1994).
• From a self-organizing systems perspective, this increased articulation destabilizes old forms of organization and eventually crystallizes a shift to an emergent new form of procedural organization that is more complex and coherent.
H. BLUM (2003)
How can self and other relationships be modified without analysis of unconscious fantasies?
Conclusions
Conclusions
• Our findings in empirical research in mother infant interaction show us specifical mathematical models of interaction of each dyad.
• The analytic case and follow up showed me the therapeutic role of experiences stored in the implicit memory, which can be recovered by analysis even without recollection.
• Dario follow up interviews illustrated me that transference allows the re-experience in the present of emotional situations belonging to the past, but not necessarily remembered. It can survive in the recollection and in the non-recollection.
• This finding are similar to Fonagys’ (1999) that implicit memories have an important role in the therapeutic process.