Abstract
Cristina Alberini cites Freud’s concept of retranscription to support recent research suggesting that memory is less indelible than had commonly been thought. While at first glance the concept of retranscription might seem to lend weight to the idea that reconsolidation can result in a lessening of one’s affective response when a memory of traumatic experience springs to mind, consideration of the clinical examples cited by Freud as examples of Nachträglichkeit (the outcome of the process of retranscription) leads to a very different conclusion. Rather than demonstrating how maturation and subsequent learning (including clinical intervention) might moderate the intensity of one’s affective response to the memory, Freud’s theory in fact does the exact opposite: it explains how a past experience may become traumatic over time. Retranscription is the mechanism Freud proposes to account for the effect new knowledge and/or developmentally based tendencies to react more strongly to certain sorts of stimuli (particularly sexual stimuli) can have when remembering past events that originally had been well tolerated but subsequently become traumatic due to the realization of what it was that was happening at the time about which one had previously been unaware.
In Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud (1895) writes: “Here we have the case of a memory arousing an affect which it did not arouse as an experience, because in the meantime the change [brought about] in puberty had made possible a different understanding of what was remembered” (p. 356); he refers to this as “deferred action.” Freud (1893) employed this reasoning two years earlier in his “single-session analysis” of Katharina, a “rather sulky-looking girl of perhaps eighteen” (p. 125) who had consulted him as he rested at an inn during a hike in the Alps. Katharina had been experiencing panic attacks that Freud, in short order, analyzed to be the result of early experiences during which her father (initially disguised in print as her “uncle”) made sexual advances. Katharina was ignorant at the time about the meaning of her father’s behavior until she subsequently witnessed something similar two years hence, when she encountered her father sexually involved with her cousin. It wasn’t this particular instance that traumatized Katharina, reasoned Freud, but her retrospective realization of the full meaning of her father’s previous advances, a realization that precipitated the first in a series of panic attacks. Freud (1918) again applied the concept of “deferred action” in his analysis of the Wolf Man’s dream: “At the age of one and a half the child receives an impression to which he is unable to react adequately; he is only able to understand it and to be moved by it when the impression is revived in him at the age of four; and only twenty years later, during the analysis, is he able to grasp with his conscious mental processes what was then going on in him” (p. 45).
Alberini assumes that Freud’s concept of retranscription has a bearing on the overall plasticity of memory, particularly the degree to which disturbing affects associated with a memory might be modifiable therapeutically, but Freud’s case material suggests otherwise. While it’s conceivable that subsequent experiences, as well as particular types of clinical intervention, might lessen a patient’s affective response either to the recall of a traumatic memory or to contemporary experiences that evoke that memory, it seems clear this is not what Freud had in mind when he spoke of retranscription and Nachträglichkeit. As every clinician knows, positive experiences one might think would counter past learning often fail to disabuse patients of the conclusions they have reached and the anticipation that issues from early learning, even though such lessons seem no longer to apply. Patients devote considerable psychic energy to maintaining their set theories and ingrained expectations, often going to great lengths to make sure incoming data are brought into line with the original theory. As a result, new experiences that seem to counter original learning often fail to modify a patient’s mindset.
Alberini faults my referencing those she characterizes as having “sensationalized” the findings of reconsolidation research by making claims that traumatic memories can be “erased.” But in fact the word erase or erasure appears in papers written by leading authorities in the field. For example, Nader (2003) writes that “reactivation of a consolidated memory can return it to a labile, sensitive state—in which it can be modified, strengthened, changed or even erased!” (p. 65), and Dudai and Eisenberg (2004) speak of how the clinical application of reconsolidation research “targeted erasure of stubborn traumatic memories” (p. 93). The authors of the book that initially drew my attention to reconsolidation research (Ecker, Ticic, and Hulley 2012) might well be guilty of sensationalizing the concept of memory erasure, though they reference eight separate reconsolidation studies in support of their contention that “a true elimination or deletion of the original learning from implicit memory apparently has been achieved” (p. 17).
I apologize, however, if I made it sound as if I lack faith in the ability of neuroscience to contribute meaningfully to psychoanalysis. I am chiefly concerned with those who advocate for the premature application of laboratory research to the clinical setting and did not intend to “discard,” “neglect,” or “dismiss” the entirety of neuroscientific research. I am encouraged, as I believe all psychoanalysts are, by the way in which neuroscientific research has helped validate psychoanalytic principles and practices, though I continue to believe it is far too early to use laboratory findings in guiding our clinical interventions. For example, I would have liked to have seen Alberini provide specific examples of how neuroscientifically derived knowledge can presently be applied that would support her assertion that “understanding the mechanisms of memory consolidation and reconsolidation has provided, and will continue to provide, valuable information for when and how to intervene in psychoanalytic settings” (p. 319). When it comes to learning, I am all ears. Yes, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. But let’s not expect the baby to walk before its time.