Some further comments on Erdelyi's claims about Freud's supposed Bartlettian view of memory construction: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Erdelyi-04022004/Referees/Erdelyi-04022004_preprint.pdf
Erdelyi (p. 28) supports his claims about the closeness of Freud's theories of memory to Bartlettian reconstruction by quoting Freud's writing that "Re-activated memoriesÂ…never re-emerge into consciousness unchanged" (1896, SE 3, p. 170). The full 1896 quotation is as follows: "The re-activated memories, however, and the self-reproaches formed from them never re-emerge into consciousness unchanged: what becomes conscious as obsessional ideas and affects, and take the place of the pathogenic memories so far as conscious life is concerned, are structures in the nature of a *compromise* between the repressed ideas and the repressing ones." What Freud is discussing are not distortions of memory of a Bartlettian kind, but (effectively) the wholesale conversion of a supposedly repressed memory of an infantile sexual experience into something very different, obsessive actions and ideas that bear no obvious relationship to the early event. Two pages later he gives an instance of what he means. "A psychical analysis" [i.e., analytic interpretation] of obsessive behaviour "shows that...they can always be fully explained by being traced back to the obsessional memories which they are fighting against" (p. 172). Here a footnote is appended in which Freud outlines such an analysis of the bedtime rituals of an obsessional patient, including obsessive tidying up his room, the bed being pushed against the wall, chairs place just so, pillows arranged in a particular way, and the patient's kicking his legs out a certain number of times before lying on his side in the bed. Freud takes each one of these elements and explains them in terms of a supposed early experience of sexual abuse by a servant-girl: "The meaning of the ceremonial was easy to guess [sic] and was established point by point by psycho-analysis." The placing of the bed and chairs was so that "nobody else should be able to get at the bed; the pillows were arranged in a particular way so that they should be differently arranged from how they were on the evening; the movements of the legs were to kick away the person who was lying on him; sleeping on his side was because in the [abuse] scene he had been lying on his back", and so on. So the theory is as follows: The original event is (supposedly) sexual abuse in infancy. The memory of this is repressed, resulting in the obsessive bedtime rituals. That is what Freud is writing about in the truncated quotation provided by Erdelyi, and it is evident that it bears no relation to Bartlettian reconstructive memory processes. The other quotations that Erdelyi provides in the same passage (p. 28) relate to the "Screen Memories" paper: he writes that Freud says that "recall is an 'amalgam' of fact and fiction; we 'construct memories almost like works of fiction' and therefore 'there is no general guarantee of the data produced by our memory' (1899, SE 3, p. 315)." These words of Freud's relates to the example he provides in the paper in question to explain his theory of retrogressive screen memories (1899, SE 3, pp. 311-322). The process is too complicated to go into in detail, but its essence is summarized by Smith as follows: "Retrogressive screen memories are produced when a *contemporary* thought is repressed and finds some associative contact with an earlier memory. The screen memory portrays the contemporary concern." (Smith, 2000, p. 11) One element in the example of an early childhood memory to which Erdelyi's quotations apply involves the individual in question (actually Freud himself) and a boy cousin picking yellow flowers with the cousin's sister, whom Freud was later to be in love with when he was seventeen. The two boys "fall on her and snatch away her flowers" (SE 3, p. 311). And so on. Freud in part interprets this scene as follows. He associates his later sexual fantasizing about his girl cousin to the memory: "Taking flowers away from a girl means to deflower her." This explains "the over-emphasis on the yellow..." (p. 318). In this fashion Freud writes that such screen memories involve the projection of a repressed contemporary idea onto authentic memory traces of an early event, so that it is distorted. So, as before, there is no gradual reconstructive process. The inaccurate memory is "formed" at a specific time [SE 3, p. 322] (in the above instance, when Freud was seventeen). While the supposed "screen memory" at least bears some resemblance to the original event represented by remaining "memory traces", it is difficult to relate the process to Bartlettian reconstruction. In any case, Smith (2000, p. 7) reports that there are only two such examples in the whole of Freud's writings, so the theory in question hardly typifies Freud's view of memory processes. References Esterson, A. (2003). "Freud's Theories of Repression and Memory: A Critique of *Freud and False Memory Syndrome* by Phil Mollon." The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice, Vol 2, No. 2: http://www.srmhp.org/0202/review-01.html Freud, S. (1896). ""Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence." In Standard Edition, vol. 3, pp. 159-185. Freud, S. (1899). "Screen Memories." In Standard Edition, vol. 3, pp. 301-322. Smith, D. L. (2000). "The Mirror Image of the Present: Freud's Theory of Retrogressive Screen Memories." Psychoanalytische Perspectieven, 2000, nr. 39, pp. 7-28. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London http://www.esterson.org/ http://www.human-nature.com/esterson/index.html http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=10 http://www.srmhp.org/0202/review-01.html http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=18 --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
