ABSTRACT
Developmentally, children, adolescents and adults have changing resources for remembering their lives and preparing themselves for life in the present and immediate future. Physical, emotional and cognitive resources are in a complex and dynamic interactional balance, unique for each individual, throughout the maturational and developmental continuum. Initially, the subject is approached from outside, that is observations of manifest behaviour become the empirical data from which inferences are made, predominantly those suggested by psychoanalytic theories of trauma, object relations and the ego and its mechanisms of defence, especially in its repressive functions. The clinical psychoanalytic material provides an inside view of memory failure and how the treatment process enabled the analysand to use remembering to overcome maladaptive behaviour and as preparation for new situations. The study of the interaction between past and present stood at the beginning of psychoanalytic work and has remained alive throughout its development.
