Recognizing the Connection Between Past and Present in Analysis Transcript: Speaker 1 Joel White wrote in his beautiful Freud biography, Freud really understood psychoanalysis as a science of the unconscious. He didn’t want to create another religion or a belief system, but at the same time, he was afraid that psychoanalysis could be swallowed by the world of academia and medicine. This was one reason why he founded the IPA in 1910 as an organization independent of the universities. And I think these had these consequences which you are just describing that we have the privilege to see our patients outside clinics and universities, and to have all these very intensive Emotional experiences with them, which are unique. But at the same time, of course, if we think we are a science and we need research in order to be taken seriously by other disciplines, by mental health representatives and not just have The reputation of being kind of a hidden religion, then I think we are in the struggle which you just described to show to representatives of the non-psycho world that what we are doing Can be made transparent also to non-believers of the psychoanalysis. Speaker 2 The word you use there to non-believers, it’s so easy to lean into that belief system, which is, like you say, borrows from religion. And it is very challenging because as you write and as everyone who’s been through it has discovered there is an experiential quality to analysis that unless and until one has it, it’s Just an interesting academic way of understanding the mind. And this is what came to mind when you brought up remembering. Remembering when understood in the lay sense or in the non-analytic sense generally leads people to imagine that what you do in analysis is you talk about your childhood and your mother Did this and your father did this and what people don’t appreciate until they’ve had the experience is that what it’s about is about recognizing how the past lives in the present. It’s that there is no past, it’s all present and the beauty of remembering is that it’s when you’ve separated out your immediate experience in the present and recognize it as belonging In the past which then leads to new remembering that your present gets freed and your future becomes one with new possibility and that’s what’s so unique about analysis. (Time 0:11:11)