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Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal

for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences
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Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the

Past
C. Brooks Brenneis Ph.D.

2700 Marshall Court, Madison, Wisconsin 53705, e-mail:

Published online: 09 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: C. Brooks Brenneis Ph.D. (1999) Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past,
Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 1:1, 125-128, DOI:
10.1080/15294145.1999.10773252
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15294145.1999.10773252

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125

Book Reviews
Edited by Alan Pollack (Boston)*

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Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and

the Past by Daniel L. Schacter. New York: Basic
Books, 1996, xiii + 398 pp., $14.00, paperback.
In the past two decades, few areas of study have
pushed farther forward the limits of knowledge than
efforts to understand the relationship between brain
and mind. Abetted by technical innovations which permit careful delineation of brain structures and the
brain in action, new theories about neural networks
and parallel distributed processing, and the study of
accidentally brain damaged humans and precisely
brain damaged animals, scientists operating in very
different realms have pulled a disjointed field into a
united discipline-cognitive neuroscience. Cognitive
psychologists, clinicians, and neuroscientists who a
decade before would not have known each other or
each other's work now know both, and actively collaborate. As a scientist who was there at the beginning
and part of the force that made it happen, it is hard to
imagine anyone more qualified than Daniel Schacter
to provide the "big picture" (p. 7) of what has been
learned, how it fits together, and what remains unclear
and unknown. Searching for Memory: The Brain, the
Mind, and the Past does exactly that through the prism
of Schacter's special area of interest, memory.
Nine-tenths of Searching for Memory is relatively
free of controversy. This is not to suggest that there
are no differing views about memory, but only that
those differences are scientific debates of little social
consequence. Because no science exists in a vacuum,
the remaining one-tenth-basically, but not exclusively chapter 9, "The Memory Wars"-is controversial. Memory not only offers a full view into the
discoveries of cognitive neuroscience, but also happens to be the battleground for a bitter, take-no prisoners dispute which has left few of us untouched and
*Submit books for review to Dr. Pollack, 1018R Chestnut Street,
Newton Upper Falls, MA, 02164, USA

unconcerned. What Schacter has to say about the issue

of recovered memories of past trauma is both eagerly
awaited, and in many respects, more complex than
anything he has to say about memory per see For these
reasons, I will review Searching for Memory one part
at a time.

I
Memory, like all human experience, is a biopsychosocial event. Memory involves intricate communications
between various substructures of the brain; it makes
past experience accessible and helps create an enduring sense of self; and it informs the behavior and voice
by which we attempt to influence and negotiate our
world. Where before the term memory, or long-term
and short-term memory might have sufficed, today it
is generally acknowledged to encompass' 'a variety of
distinct and dissociable processes and systems" (p. 7).
Schacter leads us through this terrain with new maps
and charts as we encounter memory which is working
(for phone numbers and the like), implicit (for priming
of perceptual recognition), procedural (for repeated
skills and habits), and explicit (for knowledge of ourselves and the world). Within the explicit domain, we
have stored semantic (impersonal information) and
autobiographical (personal) memory. Autobiographical memory itself can be broken down into recollections of lifetime periods (e.g., college years), general
event knowledge (college dating), and event specific
(first college date).
Memory's territory covers the extraordinary as
well as the ordinary. Emotional intensity may render
some experiences so sharply as to be nearly indestructible and unavoidable. Paradoxically, emotional intensity may also blot out experiences and produce dense
amnesias. The vast majority of these cases involve
some concurrent or past brain trauma and resolve
fairly quickly. Some kinds of brain damage produce

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126
oddities, such as Neil, the young man who, incredibly,
was able to write down information he could not convey in speech. Or GR, a 67-year-old stroke victim with
no specific memories of his past and no specific sense
of personal identity. In the midst of an operation, he
remembered that he had had a virtually identical operation 25 years earlier, and within days regained
enough memory to reconstitute a self he had lost.
These experiences of the mind are correlates of
increasingly better understood brain activity. For example, explicit memory and the registration of novel
experiences involves the hippocampus, while elaborative encoding seems to occur within the left inferior
prefrontal cortex. The medial temporal region is critical for the consolidation of explicit memory, but once
established, need no longer be involved. The amygdala, a structure which regulates emotion, also plays
an active role in memories with powerful emotional
charges. Frontal lobe injury compromises strategic retrieval attempts and is implicated in false recognitions
and confabulations which mistakenly label the origin
of an ideation as memory (source monitoring errors).
And contrary to earlier notions, any given memory is
not collected in one place, but has pieces stored in
different locations.
Schacter makes it clear that memory is not unitary
but fractured and distributed in the brain, and similarly
that it is neither static nor veridical in the mind. Nowhere is this more evident than in the role of retrieval
cues. The subjective experience of memory is "a new,
emergent entity" (p. 70) which combines aspects of
stored fragments (the engram) with features of the retrieval environment to yield a recollection that "differs from either of its constituents" (p. 70). Under
some circumstances, for example, the passage of time,
the resulting recollection may owe more to the retrieval context than the originally encoded memory. It
is not hard to imagine that the story of a high school
athletic feat which emerges after a few drinks at a 25year class reunion might deviate substantially from
whatever happened a quarter-century earlier. The fabric we call memory is a tapestry of encoded bits from
the past distributed here and there in the brain crisscrossed with influences from the present and revised
by unconscious beliefs and attitudes to emerge as a
coherent personal narrative. Moreover, every act of
recollection, whether for the purpose of introspection
or communication, is itself subject to memory and alters the memory in turn. And yet this incredibly complex process works, generally well enough and
without much conscious effort, and is a remarkable
but entirely ordinary human gift.

Book Reviews
This cursory flyover fails to do justice to the
scope of Schacter's vision of memory. Ranging back
and forth between close-ups of case histories or specific research and draw-backs of broader perspectives,
a master's touch is evident throughout. His knowledge
of the scientific literature is encyclopedic, and yet offered in a highly accessible fashion. For those interested in more details, deeper uncertainties, and precise
references, the extensive notes (pp. 309-349) and bibliography (pp. 350-385) sections will more than suffice. His carefully rendered case examples illuminate
aspects of memory and are often in their own right
compelling narratives. Source monitoring, for example, is illustrated with the frightening story of Donald
Thompson, a psychologist whose specialty is, ironically, memory distortion and eye witness identification. Thompson was questioned by the police about
his participation in a rape because he was an identical
match to the victim's description of the assailant. Incredibly, Thompson's alibi explained the misidentification: The woman had been watching Thompson on
television just before the rape!
This vast treatise on memory is written with a
scholar's love and excitement for his subject. Scientists derive personal satisfactions from their work, as
is evident in Schacter's engaging personal account of
how he helped Barbara (pp. 176-179), a young woman
who had lost much of her autobiographical and semantic memory to encephalitis, to learn rather intricate
computer coding. Equally engaging, though in a different way, is Schacter's description of the discovery of
implicit memory (pp. 161-171). His inclusion of fictional and nonfictional literary references, personal
anecdotes, and selected art works not only add depth,
but also convey something of his abiding affection for
memory's many faces. One would only have wished
that the publisher of the soft cover edition had retained
the chromatic version of these illustrations because
the black and white ones are quite fuzzy and consequently lose much of their value. A small quibble
about a work of unsurpassed scholarship written with
great affection.

II
The aptly entitled chapter "The Memory Wars: Seeking Truth in the Line of Fire" brings to bear Schacter' s
very considerable expertise on the problem of recovered memories of trauma. This dispute ties the risk of
ignoring a genuine social evil--child abuse-to the
creation of inverted evil-the falsely accused,

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Book Reviews
shunned, and, in some instances, imprisoned. It is not
beyond possibility that one side has the more convincing evidence. There are four interlocking questions to
be tackled here-Can childhood abuse be forgotten?
Can these forgotten experiences be recovered with
some accuracy? Can illusory memories of childhood
abuse be created? And can accurate and illusory memories be distinguished?
The short answer to these questions is, respectively, "sometimes," "sometimes," "yes," and
"maybe." To provide more detailed answers,
Schacter critically reviews the available clinical evidence and matches it with what is known about how
memory actually works. He acknowledges that some
people have forgotten single episodes of abuse, but
thinks that no credible evidence substantiates the immediate and long-term forgetting of multiple, horrific
abuse which occurs after early childhood. As far as the
recovery of memories of abuse is concerned, Schacter
describes several well-publicized and documented
cases, but seems to regard these as much more the
exception than the rule. When it comes to illusory
memories of childhood abuse, the evidence to argue
for their creation, while circumstantial, is massive.
Nonetheless, even though Schacter can find little support for some of the most bizarre and incredible recovered memories, he notes that the absence of credible
evidence cannot be taken as conclusive. Finally, he
examines the use of implicit or unconscious memory
to distinguish real from false recollections. This tactic
seems "plausible" to Schacter, but clearly he views
it as a very risky proposition. Reactions based on specific prior experiences do not come with a readily visible tag labeling them as "implicit memory."
Consequently, inferences about what represents implicit memory, and not just the twitches and habits of
ordinary life, are highly subjective and unreliable.
Schacter's deep skepticism about the veracity of
recovered memories is, to this reader, sometimes
masked by his determination to leave the scientific
door open on the phenomenon. Too often, his most
devastating arguments are bracketed with disclaimers,
given in small print in the notes section, or counterbalanced by supporting arguments which give the benefit
of the doubt to weak clinical evidence. On the one
hand, this introduces a measure of confusion in the
reader's mind about how strong his reservations really
are; and, on the other hand, leaves his skeptical opinions open to rather gross misrepresentation, as happened in a Columbia Journalism Review article
(Schacter, personal communication, October 6, 1998).

127
Beyond this, Schacter's critique does not make full
use of a further avenue for doubt.
The emphasis in Searching for Memory on the
internal processes by which the brain and the mind
encode, store, and retrieve memory slights memory's
social role. Schacter notes that "there has been surprisingly little work concerned specifically with social
influence on memory" (p. 271), but this assessment,
I think, is too narrow a view. Quite aside from the fact
that one could reasonably view most therapeutically
recovered memories as a chilling demonstration of social influence on memory, there is much to be said
about the ways social and interpersonal forces shape
and even create memory.
Autobiographical memory is constructed as narrative, and because the narrative form presumes an
audience, autobiographical memories are always social. They cannot exist outside of social consequences
and indeed yield to and are shaped by external affiliations, rewards, and punishments. Similarly, if apparent
priming and perceptual sensitivities are construed as
implicit memory for unremembered trauma, they too
can be used to construct a narrative, become social
events, and can be shaped by social consequences.
A case in point is provided by the Gulf War veterans who later developed posttraumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). A significant number of these veterans over
time changed their memories of what happened from
the less to the more traumatic (Southwick, Morgan,
Nicolaou, and Charney, 1997). What might account
for the later recall of traumatic events which were not
remembered just after their alleged occurrence? PTSD
may be a psychiatric diagnosis, but is also a diagnosis
with distinct social advantages, so many that it has
been described by the editor of the American Journal
of Psychiatry as one of the very few psychiatric diagnoses people want to have (Andreason, 1995). So
many that the diagnostic criteria had to be tightened
significantly to prevent its almost indiscriminate use.
For these Gulf War veterans, their autobiographical
memories may have been unwittingly molded and created to capture the social advantages of a diagnosis
ofPTSD.
In a parallel fashion, the prerequisite construction
of illusory memories of trauma may, for some people,
be outweighed by the less clear-cut but no less powerful interpersonal reinforcements to be derived from a
defined explanation for their distress, an agreed-upon
abrogation of certain responsibilities, and the sympathetic emotional support and affiliation with a trusted
authority figure. Memory is never beyond the reach of
social traffic; and while it is quite wrong to suggest

128
that Schacter is unaware of this, it gets scanted in
the main part of Searching for Memory and is not
adequately brought to bear in "The Memory Wars."
The case for therapeutically recovered memories
pales compared to the case against them. His cautions
notwithstanding, Schacter's arguments of doubt are
more than convincing to me, and can be made even
stronger by including the role of social forces in influencing memory. His efforts to identify "shades of
gray" (p. 277) seem more rhetorical than real, and the
"middle ground" (p. 277) he hopes to mark out, more
virtual than real.

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III
Searching for Memory is a magnificent book. Schacter
draws from a richly textured and vast pallet of often
conflicting information to paint a wonderfully detailed
panorama of memory, the mind, and the brain as seen
in the advances of the last several decades. His love
for his subject, as well as his extraordinary erudition,
are unmistakable. Judged from the standard of how
many references I checked off to locate and read, it
is a treasure trove. I only wish he had stated his pervasive doubts about the recovered memory issue less
ambiguously, and hope I have not overestimated his
skepticism in the process.

References
Andreason, N. (1995), Posttraumatic stress disorder: Psychology, biology, and the Manichaean warfare between
false dichotomies. Amer. J. Psychiatry, 152:963-965.
Southwick, S., Morgan, A., Nicolaou, A., & Charney, D.
(1997), Consistency of memory for combat-related traumatic events in veterans of Operation Desert Storm.
Amer. J. Psychiatry, 154:173-177.

c. Brooks Brenneis, Ph.D.

2700 Marshall Court
Madison, Wisconsin 53705
e-mail: brenneis@facstaff.wisc.edu.
The Neuropsychology of Dreams: A Clinico-Anatomical Study by Mark Solms. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997, 292 pp., $55.95
This book is a goldmine, full of many deep veins although it also has a few shallow ones. The author
provides an extremely rich view and review of the

Book Reviews
role of the cerebral cortex in dreams. He does this in
three parts: (1) a comprehensive review of neurologic
literature from the nineteenth century to the present;
(2) his own study of 361 cases with cerebral lesions
and a group of symptomatic controls without CNS
pathology; and (3) a series of hypotheses he develops
which weave through the clinical material and help
keep a focus on the meaning of the findings. The major
impact of this book is how clearly the author demonstrates the crucial role played by a number of telencephalic structures in the generation of dreams. This
convincingly contradicts the long accepted notion that
REM sleep and therefore dreaming is mainly the result
of pontine activity. The pontine theory has contributed
to the belief that dreams are inherently meaningless.
For psychoanalysts such an idea should not make
sense. Indeed, this reviewer's sense, as an analyst, that
dreams could not be purely based on pontine activity
led to a study (Greenberg, 1966) showing the important role of the visual association cortex in the parietal area in the generation of the eye movements in
REM sleep. At the same time animal studies also
showed the cortical contributions (Jeannerod, Mouret,
and Jouvet, 1965). Nonetheless, the belief in the central role of the pons persisted. Solms' book should put
an end to such thoughts as he shows, both in his review
of the literature and from his own cases, the essential
role of the cerebral cortex in the generation of and
quality of dreams.
Solms begins his presentation by describing the
Charcot-Wilbrand syndrome based on case reports by
Charcot and Wilbrand. These turn out to be two different disorders although they have been lumped together
as one. In the Charcot form the patient loses visual
dreaming although dreams continue in other modalities. Such patients also suffer from visual irreminiscence, a condition in which they lose all visual
imagery in waking life. The Wilbrand variant seems
to have complete cessation of dreaming. Interestingly,
the lesions in these two forms of disorder are in different locations and have differing waking symptoms.
Charcot's variant and subsequent cases like it seem to
have bilateral lesions in the medial occipital temporal
areas, while Wilbrand's variety is most clearly the result of bilateral lesions in the medial basal frontal areas. As Solms provides his extremely comprehensive
review one learns that lesions in a number of other
cortical and subcortical areas can affect the subjective
experience of dreaming. He describes increases in intensity, decreases in intensity, and loss of some sensory modalities in dreams. He clearly demonstrates
how the effects on dreams are not the result of primary