The Writings of Ivor Browne: Steps along the road-the evolution of a slow learner

27. ‘Unassimilated Happenings’ and the False Memory Syndrome

This paper and ‘Healing the Trauma’ were never published, although I did send them to the American Journal of Psychiatry, not realizing how much thinking had changed in the USA. They had dismissed the previous emphasis on psychoanalysis and dynamic psychiatry and shifted to a narrow medical view of psychiatric illness, claiming that it was all ‘biologically based’. When I was in the US in 1960, every professorial chair was headed by a psychoanalyst. By the time I submitted these papers, there was not a single psychoanalytical professor and the major centres all across the country were headed by neurophysiologists and pharmacological psychiatrists. Not only did they refuse to publish the papers but they also rubbished the theories that I was proposing, saying there was no evidence to support these ideas. THE main concern of this paper is the way in which human experience is processed and integrated into the central nervous system and in particular the impact of psychological trauma. This was the subject of two previous papers,2 and the more complete hypothesis presented here is based on extensive clinical work with psychologically traumatized patients. To put it in its simplest form, when an event takes place in the external world we do not fully experience it as it happens, although we do undoubtedly register it and take an impression of the raw experience as it is taking place, otherwise the event would no longer exist within us once it has happened in the external world. Evidence exists for this registration, in that many years afterwards a traumatic event may be recalled in complete detail in what Horowitz termed a ‘video-tape of the mind’.3 In other words, experiencing something fully and turning it into memory is a process that takes place over time. This involves neurophysiological and somatic work proportional to the degree of 27. ‘Unassimilated Happenings’1 and the False Memory Syndrome 345 disturbance and threat that the traumatic event poses to the integrity of the organism concerned. The fact that a traumatic event can reappear after many years, when the person had no conscious recollection of it until then, immediately raises the question whether some or any of such activated experiences are genuine recollections or fantasies. This question is of particular concern in the light of recent revelations regarding over-enthusiastic therapists in the States and elsewhere and the widespread debate in regard to the ‘false memory syndrome’. We will return to this question later in the paper but in order to do so it is first necessary to address the main concern of this paper and describe more fully what we mean by ‘unassimilated happenings’. For, depending on whether or not this hypothesis is sound, the whole basis of the debate surrounding the so-called ‘false memory syndrome’ will be altered. It has long been recognized that, when a living creature is faced with a threat to its physical integrity, it responds to the challenge with the noradrenergically mediated ‘fight or flight’ response.4 In situations where defensive or evasive actions are not possible, it appears that an organism has at its disposal an equally ancient and basic strategy for survival; that is, the capacity, when faced with an overwhelming external threat, to ‘freeze’ or ‘play dead’.5 This involves the operation of a primitive biological, adaptive response which acts at the level of the limbic system (outside of conscious awareness or control) and blocks, partially or completely, the processing and integration of the experience. The potentially disintegrative effect of the external threat is signalled by the initial surge of emotion which occurs as the event is appraised by the primitive brain. It would seem that it can be only thus that the significance of dangers or threatening events are recognized . This primitive biological response is widespread in nature and constitutes a highly effective survival manoeuvre when ‘fight or flight’ is not possible. Similar to other survival mechanisms in lower animals, this ‘freeze response’, while present in human beings, appears to have been modified to serve a somewhat different purpose in modern human conditions. As well as being a way of avoiding external danger, it may now be used to deal with the threat of internal destabilization: whenever we are faced with an overwhelming experience which we sense to be potentially disintegrative, 346 The Writings of Ivor Browne we have the ability to suspend it in an unassimilated, inchoate...