“Mismatch” in the Search for “Effortless Permanence”: Discussion of “Rethinking Therapeutic Action”

Abstract

In this discussion of Kenneth Frank’s paper “Rethinking Therapeutic Action: Finding Commonality in Diversity,” critical elements of research on memory reconsolidation are specified for transformational change through psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Central functions of the therapeutic relationship are put forth, including the use of the relationship for delineating often dissociated “maladaptive emotion schemas” and developing tolerance for necessary experiences of activated relational trauma. The therapeutic relationship is central in the process of tolerating destabilized traumatic memory and making it available for update. Often the therapeutic relationship offers an experience of “mismatch” or new experience with links to the emotional schema, facilitating a key component of change.

Keywords:

• psychoanalysis
• memory reconsolidation
• attachment
• transformational change
• emotional schema
• psychotherapy integration

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Rethinking Therapeutic Action: Finding Commonalty in Diversity

Notes

¹ In laboratory studies with human subjects, erasure of fear memories by experiential learning has been shown to occur in the subcortical emotional memory system including the amygdala and also in the explicit declarative, contingency-learning memory system involving the neocortex (cited in Ecker, 2018).

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Notes on contributors

Katherine H. Leddick

Katherine H. Leddick, PhD, is a psychologist psychoanalyst in private practice. She received her PhD, in clinical psychology from UCLA, and her postdoctoral certificate in psychoanalysis from NYU. Dr. Leddick supervises and teaches psychoanalysis at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies and the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy. She has published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues and in the Relational Perspectives Book Series. Dr Leddick is in private practice with adults and adolescents in Manhattan and Brooklyn, NY.