ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that psychoanalysts have become familiar with the effects of trauma on memory. It suggests that trauma may make it difficult to access the goodness of the past for either of two reasons: because the past was traumatic then, or because the present is traumatic now. The chapter offers several illustrations and examples in which the memory or the affective resonance of the more distant past is inhibited, dampened, or damaged in some other way by traumatic events in the present or recent past. A. Modell tells that metaphor allows the creation of new meanings in the interaction of past with present; and the chapter proposes that witnessing allows the creation of metaphor. Modell was influenced by the work of neuroscientist Gerald Edelman on neural networks and cognitive processing, and that of cognitive linguist George Lakoff and of philosopher Mark Johnson on the central role of metaphor in cognition.
