“Implicit Memory” Cannot Explain Dissociated Traumatic Memory: A Theoretical Critique

ABSTRACT

Similarities between implicit memories and unprocessed traumatic memories have led traumatologists to equate them. Both have “physicality”: They are grounded in the body rather than narrative, being retrieved in sensations, motor responses, affects, ego states, and images. Sheltered from the cognitive processes that use language to alter memories, they remain stable over time, unconscious, and dependent on specific retrieval cues that replicate part of the original event. Nevertheless, if dissociation produces unprocessed traumatic memories whereas association produces implicit memories, how can they be identical? I argue that they differ in the causal mechanisms and unconscious strategies that the self uses to process their physicality. I hypothesize that unprocessed traumatic memories change over time if the self integrates their physicality into its central goals and meanings, its core, making them less similar to implicit memories and more similar to normal event memories. I propose a new concept, “self-embodied memories”–related to concepts developed by Elin (1997) and Glenberg (1997)–that, like the concept of implicit memory, captures memory's physicality but also relates it to the self s processing strategies. A clinical vignette illustrates changes in a child's unprocessed traumatic memory as it became integrated with her sense of self.

KEYWORDS:

• Traumatic memory
• implicit memory
• embodied self memory
• dissociation
• unconscious
• self-integration
• encoding-specificity
• accuracy