ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to further differentiate between memory of historic events and the assimilation of the experience. Remembered events that share many qualities with the actual experience reflect the autohypnotic process that ensured survival. The factual memories can be compared to screens hiding the constant unconscious work at integrating the total personality and giving these events a personal meaning. Thus, potentially traumatising experiences lead to a personality organisation that has certain identifiable characteristics. Reflection, emotion, and self-awareness are brought under the dominance of external reality geared to effective action leading to survival. Memory can survive as a presentation, a screen divorced from the sense of self, according to its factual properties, and it survives as a representation, an integrated part of the individual's history, having undergone the transformations caused by the event's personal construction. The factual memories owe their special fate, different to the manner in which the memory for events functions generally, to the division, originating in the experience.
