The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

by Norman Doidge

Freud’s fourth neuroplastic idea helped explain how it might be possible to make unconscious traumatic memories conscious and retranscribe them. He observed that in the mild sensory deprivation created by his sitting out of the patients’ view, and commenting only when he had insights into their problems, patients began to regard him as they had important people in their past, usually their parents, especially in their critical psychological periods. It was as though the patients were reliving past memories without being aware of it. Freud called this unconscious phenomenon “transference” because patients were transferring scenes and ways of perceiving from the past onto the present. They were “reliving” them instead of “remembering” them. An analyst who is out of view and says little becomes a blank screen on which the patient begins to project his transference. Freud discovered that patients projected these “transferences” not only onto him but onto other people in their lives, without being aware of doing so, and that viewing others in a distorted way often got them into difficulty. Helping patients understand their transferences allowed them to improve their relationships. Most important, Freud discovered that transferences of early traumatic scenes could often be altered if he pointed out to the patient what was happening when the transference was activated and the patient was paying close attention. Thus, the underlying neuronal networks, and the associated memories, ...