The last century has seen substantial research on memory, though the vast bulk of this has focussed on episodic (personal, conscious) memory systems. However, recent decades have made it clear that amnesic patients can be markedly impaired in explicitly recalling new episodic events, but appear to preserve the capacity to use information from other sources, such as procedural or skills-based memory. Thus, the richness of our memorial lives is generated by our ability to run multiple memory systems in parallel. Of these, the topic of perhaps greatest interest to the psychoanalytic community, and yet the most under-researched, is that of emotion-related memory systems. These seem of particular interest in the context of motivated forgetting, or repression, where the worlds of emotion and conscious episodic memory seem to interact most powerfully. This lecture will review what we know of the organizing principles, and basic anatomy, of the various memory systems. We will especially focus on the independence of emotion-based learning and episodic memory, including remarkable accounts, from our research group, of patients with episodic amnesia undertaking psychotherapy. These findings allow us to investigate the role that emotion-based memory may play in clinical issues, such as transference, infantile amnesia, in PTSD, and indeed the role of executive function in the ‘return of the repressed’.

Oliver Turnbull, Ph.D., is a neuropsychologist (and a clinical psychologist), with an interest in emotion and its many consequences for mental life. His interests include: emotion-based learning, and the experience that we describe as ‘intuition’; the role of emotion in false beliefs, especially in neurological patients; and the neuroscience of psychotherapy. He is the author of a number of scientific articles on these topics and, together with Professor Mark Solms, wrote the popular book The Brain and the Inner World.