Report on the 16th International Neuropsychoanalysis Congress, Amsterdam: “Plasticity and Repetition (and Other Topics)”

The 16th Annual Congress of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society took place in Amsterdam during July 9–11, 2015, followed by a Sunday postcongress discussion on July 12. The Congress was held at the University of Amsterdam and the Sunday meeting at the Psychoanalytic Foundation. People from all regions of the world attended, including countries such as Japan, Israel, Turkey, Panama, Finland, Puerto Rico, Spain, South Africa and Suriname among many others, constituting a widely varied community of people interested in neuropsychoanalysis. As seen in previous congresses, an educational day preceded the official start of the Congress with four speakers. The first was Anna Bentinck van Schoonheten, who spoke about changes in personality, repetition and psychoanalytic technique in the history of psychoanalysis. Her talk reviewed some of Freud’s reflections about the objectives of the psychoanalytic technique, going from discovering unconscious material and communicating it at the right moment to the patient by means of interpretation, to the limitations of psychoanalytic treatments by admitting that the patient is unable to remember all the repressed material that could be of relevance to the treatment. The importance of the transference was highlighted, in order to review some of the concepts in Kleinian theory such as the role of introjection and projection and their differences in pregenital and genital patients. The next talk was given by Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber with a presentation entitled How to study the outcomes of psychoanalyses? A balancing act between societal needs and epistemological impossibilities. Leuzinger-Bohleber specified the complexities around psychoanalytical research in detail and also described her ongoing psychoanalytic project on depression. After comparing cognitive–behavioral long-term therapies against psychoanalysis, the outcome was shown to be the same with either technique. Symptoms diminished after one year of treatment but psychoanalyses also had the chance of recording important data related to the patients’ depression. These data revealed that childhood trauma was found in about 85% of the participants. Furthermore, dreams were used to observe the progress of the patients and they changed over the course of treatment: they came to include more human than animal characters, the patient was more active and the most important person in the dream, and affects grew in intensity. The third talk was given by Yoram Yovell, who introduced the classical neuroscience perspectives on memory. He started with the story of HM: Brenda Milner’s work with this famous neurological patient made clear that there are multiple memory systems. From Hebb’s statement that memory is in synapses through the explicit and implicit memory systems, Yovell took the audience on a dynamic tour of the neuroanatomy of each type of memory and the stages of episodic memory formation. He cited researchers who question the very existence of repression, presented neuropsychoanalytic studies that document the existence of repression-like phenomena, and gave examples of the distortions found in false memories, specifying that they are not lies but reconstructions of certain experiences that are modified for several reasons. He took into account studies of sexual abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder. Furthermore, he emphasized the importance of emotional memories and how these systems are fully functional during the first year of life as opposed to the hippocampal episodic memory system, which is only functional by the third or fourth year of life. Important implications of memory functioning should be taken into account by psychoanalysis, according to Yovell. The last presentation of the educational day was given by Cristina Alberini on the mechanisms of memory reconsolidation. She reviewed the two forms of long-term memory (LTM), namely explicit or declarative and implicit or non-declarative, as well as some basic rules about memory, such as the fact that recent memories are more fragile than old ones, and that LTM implies the expression of genes.