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1. 00:02 did you forget me if so you may be suffering from
2. 00:09 dissociation no I'm just kidding if you forgot about me probably you're mentally
3. 00:15 healthy okay Shanim today we're going to discuss amnesia the art and science of
4. 00:24 forgetting my name is Sam Vakn the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited and lest you forgot
5. 00:31 I'm also a professor of psychology I would like to propose a new
6. 00:38 taxonomy of dissociation or dissociative disorders or dissociative effects
7. 00:44 effects and so on dissociation is when you slice off when
8. 00:51 you shut out something that you find unbearable intolerable
9. 00:57 overwhelming or threatening now according to my new taxonomy you could shut out yourself by divorcing yourself by
10. 01:09 detaching from yourself you no longer feel the threat or the displeasure or the ego destiny or the fear if you are not you then of course you're not
11. 01:21 subject to these negative effects so I call it internalized dissociation but
12. 01:29 you could also shut out the world you could also divorce the world you could
13. 01:35 also let go of reality the most extreme form is of course psychosis but in less
14. 01:43 in more normal people we would have externalized dissociation examples of
15. 01:50 internalized dissociation are amnesia and
16. 01:57 depersonalization examples of external dissociation is an example is
17. 02:03 derealization now go to the description i have a video there which deals with
18. 02:09 depersonalization and derealization going autopilot and
19. 02:15 there's another video there which deals with structural dissociation which is the overall arching
20. 02:22 framework currently in use by most practitioners most scholars when we deal
21. 02:28 with dissociation today I want to focus on amnesia amnesia as I said is about
22. 02:36 forgetting amnesia is actually a form of numbing yourself a form of avoiding triggers a
23. 02:43 way to avoid triggers by not experiencing them amnesia therefore is
24. 02:49 the exact opposite of being there of being present of experiencing life
25. 02:57 unmediated in a direct manner amnesia is like a filter and it is like a firewall
26. 03:05 it is an interface between you and reality when reality internal or external has become too much amnesia signifies an integration failure there's
27. 03:18 information coming from the environment there are experiences you are going through and yet you cannot integrate
28. 03:25 them you cannot own them you cannot make them part of who you are and amnesia
29. 03:32 gives rise to dissociative fragments and in a very extreme cases dissociative
30. 03:39 identities for example in dissociative identity disorder so amnesia is about isolating
31. 03:48 encapsulating an internal or external internal experience for example is memory so encapsulating an internal or
32. 03:56 external experience kind of cocooning
33. 04:02 them placing them in styrofoam and then isolating isolating them from the rest
34. 04:09 of your personality from other psychonamics processes from everything
35. 04:15 that's happening inside it's as if there's you and then there there is there are these isolated external or
36. 04:22 internal experiences floating somewhere not part of you not interacting with the
37. 04:28 rest of you um amnesia is of course like all other dissociative symptoms or dissociative reactions or defenses amnesia is about being overwhelmed
38. 04:42 nisia occurs when you are overwhelmed by something again you could be overwhelmed
39. 04:49 by internal psychonamics you could be overwhelmed by memories by intolerable
40. 04:56 impulses by choices or actions that you have taken which are dissonant they
41. 05:02 create dissonance cognitive dissonance doxastic dissonance dissonance regarding
42. 05:08 beliefs axiological dissonance dissonance regarding values whenever there's dissonance that cannot be
43. 05:14 resolved sometimes people choose to forget about it and amnesia sets in it's
44. 05:22 a way to quell and to reduce and to mitigate intense negative adverse
45. 05:30 effects emotions which threaten to drown you and take you apart physical
46. 05:36 sensations misperceptions and misattributions of other people for example paranoid ideiation
47. 05:44 the test of amnesia and other dissociative defenses is not in the precursors is not
48. 05:52 in the triggers we are all exper exposed to similar
49. 05:58 triggers it seems that some people are more sensitive they're more prone to
50. 06:04 dissociation for example we all sometimes entertain paranoid ideiation we all say "Can we trust this person is there some kind of malignant or malicious or malevolent conspiracy
51. 06:16 against me are these people uh planning to undermine me and subvert me and so on
52. 06:24 we always misinterpret other people's motivations their uh mentality and so on
53. 06:30 we always suspect that we were passed over for promotion because envious
54. 06:36 people conspired against us and so on this is very common but people who are sensitive to
55. 06:43 dissociation would find this kind of thinking this kind of ideation intolerable
56. 06:50 overpowering dominating um disabling causing dysfunction and in
57. 06:56 order to avoid this they may simply forget it forget about it slice it off
58. 07:04 shut it out and this is amnesia amnesia is
59. 07:10 therefore in my work and in the work of of others not everyone by the way agrees but in my work amnesia is an active defense against everything that I've
60. 07:21 just mentioned against everything intolerable everything burdensome everything unbearable everything terrifying everything everything threatening everything dissolent it's a
61. 07:32 defense it's an extreme form of detachment repression
62. 07:39 compartmentalization denial and therefore dissociation in other words in
63. 07:45 my work amnesia includes all these elements and all these ostensibly separate defense mechanisms are actually dissociative
64. 07:56 i see no distinction and no difference between for example amnesia and
65. 08:02 detachment amnesia and repression amnesia and compartmentalization i think repression detachment compartmentalization and denial would be totally impossible without amnesia
66. 08:14 dissociation therefore underlies numerous defense mechanisms and one
67. 08:20 could even generalize and say that dissociation is at the core of the very
68. 08:26 concept and and and and process of defense mechanism defense mechanism is
69. 08:33 about defense mechanisms are about dissociating us either from
70. 08:39 ourselves or from the external environment and con consequently when we cause people for example patients in certain clinical
71. 08:50 settings in my cold therapy definitely it is based on retraumatization when we
72. 08:56 cause people to relieve to reexperience trauma it overwhelms them and it requires a lot of work to integrate this
73. 09:08 new knowledge and if we don't do this work people instantly
74. 09:14 instantly revert to amnesia so in certain clinical setting and not only in
75. 09:20 clinical setting in life when there is a reexperiencing or reliving or vividness reexperiencing of the trauma retraumatization people react again with amnesia it's clearly a defense against
76. 09:37 not only trauma but the memory of trauma the traces of trauma which are both in
77. 09:43 body and in mind and so the intimate connection between trauma and amnesia is
78. 09:50 beyond doubt to overcome amnesia in clinical settings
79. 09:56 otherwise in social interactions and so on to overcome amnesia we need to do a lot of integrative work which is very reminiscent of shadow work
80. 10:08 indeed in Jung's um in Jung's theories complexes such as the shadow archetypes
81. 10:16 which ostensively are transmitted across generations all these are actually
82. 10:24 dissociated artifacts they're sliced away they're shunned they're they're buried like in
83. 10:31 the famous Edgar Ellen Po movie um story they are kind of buried and and so
84. 10:38 dissociation is a major major um element
85. 10:44 in the work of Carl Gustavong in clinical practice dissociative amnesia is not considered a separate disorder but some kind of um
86. 10:58 symptom it co- occurs as a component of other disorders for example post-traumatic stress disorder um dissociative identity disorder even
87. 11:09 complex trauma in some cases dissociative symptoms such as amnesia
88. 11:15 um are a part and parcel of the
89. 11:21 psychopathology of many types of mental illness psychosis mood disorders anxiety
90. 11:28 disorders eating disorders substance abuse disorders acute stress disorder
91. 11:35 post-traumatic stress disorder somatic symptom disorder borderline personality disorder schizotipal personality
92. 11:42 disorder the the the dissociative disorders of course and I would even add narcissistic personality disorder which
93. 11:49 I regard as a form of dissociative identity disorder in all these dissociative amnesia plays a major role i would like to refer you to the
94. 12:02 Bible of dissociation the title is dissociation and the dissociative disorders past
95. 12:09 present and future edited by Martin Dorahi and others published by taylor
96. 12:17 and Francis in 2023 i recommend that you also obtain that's a second edition i
97. 12:23 recommend that you also obtain the first edition because there are major differences so in this
98. 12:29 book we find um dozens of articles on dissociation written by the most eminent experts on the topic and I would like to
99. 12:40 refer to an article by Sylvia Solinski um where she discusses the the
100. 12:47 connection the nexus or the causation between trauma and
101. 12:53 dissociation and here's what she has to say impaired memory for traumatic events
102. 12:59 has been widely documented in diverse populations for example combat veterans
103. 13:05 Holocaust survivors witnesses of violence or death sexually abused or otherwise maltreated children and she refers to work by Bruin Dalenburg and
104. 13:16 and others trauma she says may be defined as an inescapably stressful
105. 13:22 event or set of circumstances that overwhelm a person's existing coping mechanisms in an environment that fails to provide a buffer or to facilitate
106. 13:33 recovery and she refers to the seinal work by Vanderhart and of course Vander
107. 13:40 Kulk in childhood says Solinski um in childhood traumas
108. 13:47 comprise both acts of commission for example sexual abuse and omission for
109. 13:53 example neglect abandonment attunement failures where the absence or periodic
110. 14:00 withdrawal of certain resources creates a threat to the child's well-being and survival i would add to this um
111. 14:09 overprotectiveness instrumentalization parentification um idolizing the child pampering and and
112. 14:19 removing the child from reality and from peer feedback um not allowing the child to
113. 14:26 separate and individuate and form boundaries all these are forms in my view of
114. 14:32 abuse traumatizing abuse which leads to amnesia memory gaps problems of
115. 14:41 dissociation which in their turn lead to solutions such as the formation of the
116. 14:47 false self in both narcissism narcissistic personality disorder and in
117. 14:53 borderline personality disorder the false self serves as a
118. 14:59 continuous nondisjointed alternative to the dissociative true self the false self is a narrative and as a narrative it
119. 15:11 maintains continuity and contiguity the false self therefore is a compensatory
120. 15:17 mechanism it compensates for the underlying dissociation in the true self
121. 15:23 it has other compensatory functions which I will not dwell on in this lecture solinski says at the moment of
122. 15:31 trauma the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force when it is force
123. 15:37 of nature we speak of disasters when it is when the force is perpetrated by people we speak of crimes abuse and
124. 15:45 atrocities for some traumatic experience is tantamount to an encounter with a radically unimaginable which alters the attitudinal and belief structure of the
125. 15:56 individual jordan Peterson uh uses the ph the word evil so does so did Scott
126. 16:04 peek his scholars claim that um narcissism for example is the personification of evil and coming in
127. 16:15 contact with the narcissist or or having a relationship with the narcissist is actually the experiencing of the outer
128. 16:22 darkness of the prince of of uh of uh darkness so in that case it would be a
129. 16:29 traumatic experience and the radically unimaginable um underlying experience would be that
130. 16:38 of evil solinsky says for others particularly survivors of child abuse
131. 16:44 trauma results in entrenched self-beliefs and internalized dire expectations hence for many individuals a particularly destructive effect of
132. 16:55 trauma is that it confirms what is expected rather than presenting a devastating inongruity and she refers to work very important work by Bramberg who
133. 17:07 came up with his own framework of self- states and this framework of self-states informs my work in the intracychic model
134. 17:15 and Herman the famous Judith Herman and her idea of complex
135. 17:21 trauma continues to discuss forgetting how abuse is remembered she
136. 17:27 says can vary partial forgetting is consistent with considerable variation in the degree of reported amnesia this
137. 17:35 includes total forgetting forgetting some basic knowledge that the abuse happened forgetting some but not all of
138. 17:42 the abusive incidents forgetting some s salient facts and episodes and
139. 17:48 remembering physical but not sexual or emotional abuse confusion and doubt regarding memories and their meaning are common even when childhood abuse has been documented davis and Davidson Frolley in 1994 note
140. 18:04 that quote chronic doubts about what did and did not happen along with a
141. 18:10 persistent inability to trust one's perceptions of reality are perhaps the most permanent and ultimately damaging
142. 18:18 long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse we can therefore and now
143. 18:24 saknin I'm interjecting we can therefore consider dissociation and especially
144. 18:30 amnesia as a form of self gaslighting it is an attempt to impair
145. 18:38 one's reality testing because reality is unacceptable unpalatable unbearable and
146. 18:46 intolerable it's a rejection of reality by creating an alternative reality of
147. 18:53 absence of nothingness it's as if it's more uh
148. 19:00 survivable to live in a void than to face what has happened so this is
149. 19:07 exactly what the child does the traumatized and abused child this kind of child chooses absence internal absence by turning off the true self and
150. 19:20 instead compensates by creating a deity a divinity a narrative that somehow
151. 19:29 continues the child by other means it's an amnesiac act on the one hand
152. 19:36 dissociative in its nature and an attempt to leverage creativity or what
153. 19:42 is called psychoticism in order to survive i continue with
154. 19:50 Sinski this is demonstrated she says by the phenomenon of underestimating prior
155. 19:56 knowledge of an experience what school called the forgot it all alone the forgot it all along
156. 20:03 effect where individuals believe that they have forgotten the abuse at a time at which they were in fact aware of it
157. 20:11 for example they may have forgotten they talked about it to someone until they discover or rediscovered the abuse this
158. 20:19 discovery may be attributable to changes in their meta awareness in other words their ability to reflect on their experiences so this meta awareness of the abuse which enables them to
159. 20:31 reinterpret it as abuse is missing factors contributing to past
160. 20:37 amnesia for abuse include young age at onset greater severity of abuse abuse by
161. 20:44 a perpetrator known to ent and trusted by the child and family dynamics that
162. 20:50 foster little especially maternal support and cultivate secrecy this is known as pseudo mutual family i have a video dedicated to pseudo mutuality and
163. 21:01 pseudo hostility in families one of the most eminent and
164. 21:07 prominent authorities on dissociation a man who has created the a trauma model
165. 21:14 of personality disorders and a trauma model of mental illness and a man whose work has informed my work very very
166. 21:22 substantially is Colin Ross colin Ross says this in the aforementioned
167. 21:29 book there are four meanings of the word dissociation referring to four different
168. 21:36 but to some degree overlapping phenomena first there is a general
169. 21:42 systems meaning of dissociation the opposite of association a disconnection
170. 21:48 or lack of interaction between two variables there are dissociation constants in physical chemistry for instance second dissociation is a technical term
171. 21:59 in experimental cognitive psychology in cognitive psychology dissociation is often a normal property of cognitive functioning for example countless
172. 22:10 studies have demonstrated the dissociation between procedural and declarative memory cohen and Eisenbal
173. 22:19 Eenberg I'm sorry in the ' 90s for example such dissociation is normal in that it
174. 22:26 does not entail any special operations or exceptional properties of the mind third meaning of dissociation is as
175. 22:35 a phenomenological term in clinical psychology and psychiatry that has been
176. 22:41 operationalized by various measures in this sense dissociation is what is measured by the items on questionnaers and structured interviews assessing dissociative experiences and symptoms for example the dissociative experiences
177. 22:57 scale D dees developed by Bernstein and Putnham in 1986 and the dissociative uh
178. 23:05 disorders interview schedule the DDIS developed by Colin Ross himself in 1997
179. 23:11 and the fourth meaning of dissociation is as an intracychic defense mechanism
180. 23:18 confusion arises when these different meanings of the word dissociation have not been specified okay so let's go to a source
181. 23:29 an authoritative source of disambiguation the American Psychological Association dictionary
182. 23:36 which by the way is available online how does it define amnesia partial or complete loss of memory either temporary or permanent it
183. 23:47 may be due to physiological factors such as injury or disease or ganic amnesia or
184. 23:54 to substance abuse drug induced amnesia or to psychological factors such as a
185. 24:00 traumatic experience and this is known as dissociative amnesia and so
186. 24:07 on uh disturbance amnesia is a disturbance according to the dictionary
187. 24:13 amnesia is a disturbance in memory marked by inability to learn new information and this is called anterror grade anterror amnesia and there's amnesia that is
188. 24:25 marked by inability to recall previously learned information or past events and this is known as retrograde amnesia
189. 24:34 when severe enough to interfere marketkedly with social or occupational functioning or to represent a significant decline from a previous level of functioning the memory loss is known as amnistic amnestic disorder
190. 24:47 we'll come to omnistic disorder in a minute i would like to read to you the definition of dissociative amnesia
191. 24:54 dissociative amnesia is a dissociative disorder characterized by failure to
192. 25:00 recall important information about one's personal experiences usually of trauma of a traumatic or stressful nature and this this failure is too extensive to be
193. 25:12 explained by normal forgetfulness recovery of memory often occurs spontaneously within a few hours and is
194. 25:20 usually connected with removal from the traumatic circumstances with which the amnesia has been associ
195. 25:27 associated this was this used to be called by the way psychoggenic amnesia amnesia okay we distinguish dissociative
196. 25:35 amnesia from functional amnesia functional amnesia is a loss of memory for events that one has personally experienced and that occurs in the absence of any identifiable neurological
197. 25:49 pathology functional amnesia is thought to arise as a defense against anxiety and distress or as a way of escaping from specific situations it is often used as a synonym
198. 26:01 of psychoggenic amnesia and dissociative amnesia but wrongly so so what is an
199. 26:07 amnestic disorder the dictionary defines it this way in the fourth edition text revision
200. 26:14 of the diagnostic and statistical manual DSM it is a disturbance in memory marked
201. 26:21 by inability to learn new information and terror grade amnesia or to recall previously learned information or past events retrograde amnesia and that is severe enough to interfere marketkedly with social or occupational functioning
202. 26:37 um or level of functioning it is a distinction should be made between
203. 26:44 amnestic disorder due to a general medical condition substance induced persisting amnestic disorder and amnestic disorder not otherwise specified
204. 26:55 the first of these due to a general medical condition can be caused by a variety of conditions such as head
205. 27:01 injury anoxia lack of oxygen herpes simplex and syphil in
206. 27:07 syphilitis and posterior cerebral artery stroke resulting in lesions in specific
207. 27:13 brain regions including the medial temporal lobe and the
208. 27:19 dianphylon and there are connections with various cortical areas as well it may be transient lasting from several hours or more
209. 27:30 uh up to a month some of this is known as transient global amnesia or it may be chronic
210. 27:37 lasting more than one month in the DSM5 and DSM text revision edition 5 text
211. 27:43 revision these have been subsumed into the category major neurocognitive disorder and it is no longer considered a distinct entity
212. 27:54 okay amnistic syndrome amnestic uh amnestic amnesic disorder
213. 28:01 um is mentioned of course in the DSM but what we want to focus on is dissociative
214. 28:09 amnesia now the the DSM F44.0 Zero defines dissociative
215. 28:16 amnesia as an inability to recall important autobiographical information usually of a traumatic or stressful nature that is inconsistent with ordinary
216. 28:27 forgetting and then it adds most often of of localized or selective amnesia for
217. 28:34 a specific event or events or generalized amnesia for identity and
218. 28:40 history and so this definition is somewhat problematic because it confuses
219. 28:48 information or the retrieval of information with lived
220. 28:54 memory and so um it is it much better suits much
221. 29:03 better applies to an amnestic episode uh or even dissociative hug than to the
222. 29:10 kind of amnesia that we are talking about in borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder
223. 29:17 where the amnesia there the dissociative defense leads to identity diffusion and
224. 29:24 identity disturbance the amnesia there is actually an active
225. 29:30 element not a passive defense but a psychonamic and the amnesia is ongoing
226. 29:38 it's it's a background operation in these mental illnesses as I mentioned narcissism borderline it's a mental process background process that
227. 29:49 constantly slices off shuts out reframes re regenerates narratives and genders
228. 29:58 fantasies and so the dissociation in borderline personalities or and in narcissism is wrongly described as a
229. 30:05 one-off you know there's a bad memory we forget about it we move on that's not the case
230. 30:12 it is intimately involved in the day-to-day functioning of the borderline narcissist and it engenders and fosters and generates additional artifacts additional clinical features and
231. 30:24 symptoms that's why this definition in the DSM is partly wrong because it
232. 30:31 ignores this dynamic aspect because the lived memory as it is
233. 30:38 reorganized by the dissociative underlying organizing principle the dissociative hermeneutic explanatory
234. 30:46 principle is totally ignored in the DSM and so um the
235. 30:55 ICD11 unfortunately in this particular case usually doesn't do it do do it but in this particular case followed the example of the DSM5 and conf the
236. 31:07 ICD11 published in 2022 also conflates um dissociative uh crisis like dissociative fugue and dissociative amnesia the description is copied from the DSM5
237. 31:23 almost verbatim and consequently both diagnostic manuals are very deficient
238. 31:30 and very partial when we attempt to somehow cope or describe or capture the dissociative
239. 31:38 undercurrens and processes in personality disorders and other compounded mental illnesses
240. 31:46 there's a major gap there which needs to be addressed back to the book dissociation
241. 31:53 and the dissociative disorders past present and future chapter 17 the perceptual theory of dissociation by Donald Beer B i would like to quote a few excerpts
242. 32:08 beer says this explanation posits that there are different memory systems conscious and non non-concious and different retrieval processes conscious
243. 32:19 memory retrieval and automatic non-concious search there is a
244. 32:25 distinction between narrative and procedural memory and between explicit and implicit memory retrieval narrative memories with their explicit retrieval are available to conscious recall but procedural memories with
245. 32:41 their implicit retrieval are not memory for relived reexperienced
246. 32:48 trauma seems to be different from both types of memory bruin in 2003 draws a
247. 32:55 similar distinction positing a situationally accessible memory system
248. 33:01 perhaps says beer there is a different dichotomy among memory systems that is reflected by narrative procedural and so on one that includes one memory that
249. 33:13 preserves an event as an ongoing firsterson experience and two memory
250. 33:19 that is non-immediate psychologically distant and accompanied by a conviction that the
251. 33:25 experience is over even if emotionally distressing reliving an amnesic trauma is a
252. 33:33 different order of experience since it evokes overwhelming intense and painful
253. 33:39 emotion displaces present time perception so it seems to be happening
254. 33:45 in the moment proceeds in what appears to be the identical sequence and subsequently cannot be remembered in
255. 33:52 other words when I'm interjecting here when we reexperience trauma very often
256. 34:00 we relive it it's as if we're there we are back in at that moment everything is
257. 34:07 happening to us again we can't remove ourselves from the scene but once the
258. 34:13 retraumatization episode is over we again slice it off we again shut it out we again kind of delete it we use
259. 34:20 dissociation and amnesia to forget about it um beer continues I propose that
260. 34:29 relived memories have been filed as ongoing or unfinished successful
261. 34:35 treatment allows that that experience to be stored as the second non-immed immediate type of memory a memory of
262. 34:41 experience that is known to be over the individual can then remember without being thrown into the experience the
263. 34:49 person can remember and know that the trauma is in the past in other words that the person is safe in short says
264. 34:57 beer a trauma is amnestic because it cannot be integrated into the person's
265. 35:03 existence as constituted or self-system using Salivanian Salivanian
266. 35:09 language salivan these traumatic experiences remain not me using more
267. 35:15 phenomenological language these traumatic experiences are excluded by the miu world structure or existence as
268. 35:24 constituted the experiences outside the limits of the person's
269. 35:30 reality an amnestic disorder therefore would imply a self system that excludes
270. 35:36 distressing probably traumatic events in commenurate with its existence as
271. 35:42 constituted again we must not forget the major
272. 35:48 conceptual contribution of Ziggman Freud and prior to Freud
273. 35:55 Janei Freud got it wrong partially of course we no longer teach Freud or even
274. 36:03 to some extent Jane but some of the concepts we are using
275. 36:10 habitually automatically in psychology today definitely in cognitive psychology
276. 36:16 in clinical psychology emanate from Freud for example it was Jane and Freud
277. 36:22 who associated strongly trauma and dissociation they made this connection
278. 36:29 freud may have identified the wrong types of trauma but he popularized the idea that
279. 36:37 trauma results very often in dissociation and that these memories
280. 36:44 that are buried and repressed should be brought back to consciousness brought back to the surface generating what he
281. 36:51 called up reaction that's all Freudian and yet it is an integral part of what
282. 36:58 we teach today in universities i should know I'm a teacher so it would behoover us to have a look at the past amnesia as Freud called it amnesia um Freud regarded amnesia as a limited gap in memory he found that
283. 37:19 events that led to the constitution of what he called hysterical symptoms are
284. 37:26 shut out of memory he noticed this he was not the first to notice this he actually went to Paris he studied under the likes of Shiao and Jane and so on so
285. 37:38 he borrowed a lot and I'm being charitable from their work
286. 37:44 he connected amnesia with hysterical symptoms sometimes he uses the word
287. 37:53 amnesia in lie of hysterical symptoms he he regarded it as the main hysterical
288. 37:59 symptom conversion symptoms aside I'm talking about the mind not the body amnesia is determined by the fact that events are not at the disposal of memory
289. 38:11 and they are not at the disposal of memory in Freud's work because of emotions because of effective reasons
290. 38:18 because they arouse unpleasure they are unbearable they're repressed from memory
291. 38:24 in order to avoid this feeling of unpleasantness discomfort fear threat
292. 38:30 and and so on and this is definitely Freud's major contribution to the study
293. 38:36 of dissociation and it stands valid today as it has been when he proposed it
294. 38:42 all amnesia in conjunction with neurotic symptoms are caused by what he called
295. 38:48 repression verong um he connected therefore freed
296. 38:55 connected therefore the same way I do dissociation and amnesia especially with
297. 39:03 repression um repression led to diss to amnesia in his work in in my work is
298. 39:10 different my work amnesia is the overriding umbrella and repression is is one type of amnesia
299. 39:18 anyhow Freud said that the contents that are subject to amnesia are all sexual or
300. 39:24 aggressive in nature and they're intimately connected to sexual or aggressive instinctual strivings urges
301. 39:31 drives impulses today we know this this is only partly
302. 39:37 true um but still he is right to a large extent someone experiences sexual abuse
303. 39:44 as a child if someone is wants to externalize aggression and it is forbidden to do so to be aggressive towards your father or your mother or your boss is you know socially frowned upon and may uh carry consequences may
304. 40:01 have consequences adverse consequences so whenever there's this problem of of
305. 40:07 the ego having to suppress the Eid in Freud's work the reality principle having to prevail over the need to be to act impulsively whenever this happens
306. 40:18 according to Freud there would be some kind of dissociation some kind of amnesia we would forget this conflict relegated to the recesses of the mind
307. 40:29 inaccess inaccessible to memory There was a suggestion in early psychoanalysis to connect the gap of memory the huge gap of memory which is
308. 40:42 known as infantile amnesia the fact that we cannot remember anything before age two or three to connect this um with sexual or aggressive instinctual
309. 40:54 forces uh we cannot explain infantile amnesia
310. 41:00 uh there's no inferiority of infantile mental functioning it's true that the brain is
311. 41:06 only halfdeveloped takes another 20 years to develop fully but the critical
312. 41:14 faculties of memory are there already so neurology or neurobiology cannot explain infantile amnesia and Freud and other psychoanalyst stepped into the bridge
313. 41:25 and suggested that the child is actively repressing memories which the child finds
314. 41:32 terrifying uh which challenge the child's nent and emerging self
315. 41:40 uh a self that has a pronounced social aspect so when the child has an urge or an impulse to act aggressively or sexually
316. 41:51 that is socially frowned upon it endangers the process of self formation
317. 41:58 and the child represses and forgets about these he experiences amnesia it's
318. 42:05 a kind if you wish of hysterical amnesia amnesia infantile amnesia it's a
319. 42:12 repression of content exactly the same way hysterics do experience amnesia in
320. 42:18 Freud's early work the large large portions of infantile
321. 42:24 amnesia um connected in psychoanalysis with sexual and aggressive impulses sexual
322. 42:31 aggressive nature um there's a debate if this kind of
323. 42:38 amnesia is derivative or primary
324. 42:44 so later in life we again experience amnesia and again it has to do with
325. 42:50 emotions and effects which we find unacceptable unpalatable parts of
326. 42:56 ourselves that we reject in this sense by the way projection is a form of amnesia all defense mechanisms as I said at the beginning of my lecture but this kind of u uh amnesia is clearly derivative it's kind of continuation
327. 43:13 of infantile amnesia the content that has been subjected to amnesia becomes directly
328. 43:20 connected to the contents represented by childhood amnesia so we have primary amnesia in childhood and then it becomes
329. 43:27 kind of a habituated kind of wow great solution and I'm going to use it again when you're an adult and then you have primary amnesia that gives rise to imitations of itself known as derivative
330. 43:41 or secondary amnesia later in life freud believed that psychoanalysis
331. 43:48 is a great way to overcome amnesia and bring forgotten material into the
332. 43:54 surface into consciousness there's a task of removing amnesia which is at at
333. 44:00 the core of psychoanalysis freud himself said that only that procedure which sets as it
334. 44:07 goal the greatest possible of elimination of infantile amnesia deserves to be called correctly
335. 44:14 conducted analysis and here we come back full circle to today's thinking most
336. 44:21 updated thinking about dissociation which basically retained these
337. 44:27 conceptual contours and demarcations and boundaries proposed by
338. 44:35 Freud amnesia is an integral part of daily
339. 44:42 life we forget there is a memory decay we forget about 50% of everything we've experienced everything we've read
340. 44:53 everything we've watched we forget about 50% within hour an hour or so forget
341. 44:59 about 90% within 24 hours amnesia is at work all the time
342. 45:07 and it's a healthy process because otherwise we will be overwhelmed by information it is it is when amnesia is
343. 45:14 applied to experiences which should have been retained because retaining them
344. 45:20 would be instructive would foster growth and development avoidance of threats and
345. 45:27 so on when amnesia interferes and represses eliminates this kind the
346. 45:34 access to these kinds of emotions that we we talk about we this we're talking about pathological
347. 45:40 conditionia so the narcissist and the borderline they experience amnesia which
348. 45:49 is derivative but which is not helpful which is dysfunctional which causes the
349. 45:56 narcissist and the borderline to develop defenses which lead to even further
350. 46:02 dysfunction the narcissist for example confabulates in a desperate attempt to bridge memory gaps yawning memory gaps the borderline acts out or assumes
351. 46:14 another self state it's all a it's all a lastditch effort to somehow
352. 46:24 survive amnesia that is encroaching and threatens to consume the individual black hole amnesia I call it and it is a pitiable a pitiable state
353. 46:36 of affairs and ultimately the narcissist and the borderline lose this
354. 46:43 battle their identity never coalesces never makes sense to them they
355. 46:50 experience absence as a viable alternative to the chaos and mayhem that their so-called identity affords and then finally they retreat there never to be found again they
356. 47:07 disappear internally in a sucking sound the equivalent of
357. 47:13 implosion having tried explosion relentlessly but having failed they
358. 47:20 decide to consume themselves and they disappear
359. 47:26 inside at that point their amnesia is total