ABSTRACT
The nature of human memory has been of central importance in psychoanalysis. A concept of memory is implicit in the idea that the past influences the present—one of the basic assumptions of psychoanalytic thinking. Self and object representations, familiar concepts in psychoanalysis, are actually concepts about memory organizations. In recent years human memory has been studied intensively in the fields of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence (see, for example, Abelson, 1981; Lindsay & Norman 1977; Loftus & Loftus, 1976; Neisser, 1976). It has become clear that human memory is not static; it appears to be involved in highly dynamic structured systems variously labeled maps, models, representations, knowledge structures, schemata, or scripts. I have used some of these terms in discussing aspects of learning, psychopathology, the analytic process, and so on (Peterfreund, 1971, 1976; Peterfreund & Franceschini, 1973).
