Witnessing across time

Over the last several decades, after a long history of virtually ignoring the role of “real” ² experience in the development of personality, many psychoanalysts have become so familiar with the impact of trauma on memory that we take the basic facts for granted. We know that the past can be frozen in our minds, its affective aspects especially inaccessible, and that under such conditions this experience cannot serve as the inexhaustible resource we otherwise depend on it to be in the course of our day-to-day creation of meaning. In one way or another, the past is foreclosed for so many of those who suffer trauma. In some cases, the entire memory is inaccessible. More frequently, though, the memory is present but affectively drained, i.e., de-animated or denatured in such a way that it has meaning only as fact, not as living experience.