Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. We can turn our ghosts into ancestors because we can transform implicit memories—which we are often not aware exist until they are evoked and thus seem to come at us “out of the blue”—into declarative memories that now have a clear context, which makes them easier to recollect
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