Anticipated Publication Date: Late, 2017
With The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Freud fired the first volley in a determined campaign to understand the mind and how it processes emotionally challenging material. His book was brilliant.
Freud premised that dreams could be used to access repressed memories, and these memories were, at their base, the cause of many psychological maladies.
He was right: Dreams serve as ‘scouts’— if you will — that lead us to the real gold — memories.
One hundred and eighteen years later we are now at the ‘real’ beginning: What do these ‘golden’ memories mean?
Memories have their own function, which I describe as perceptographic. Memories show us how we see things and what is problematic in them. Our task? To decipher them.
I designed Cognitive-Perceptual theory to detail how autobiographical memory operated as it interacted with personality. And, how to understand the meaning and function of its products, autobiographical memories. Once we understand what memories mean and how they function, we can specify how particularly important memories in our lives are used — a major goal of this book.
The Last Lecture offers a contextual view of memories (Pepper 1942) which permits us to determine where — the context — a client is stuck in her life development and what we can do as psychologists to help work the issue through.
I have worked in this field for 44 years. I spent over five years doing a NIDA study with inmates in a woman’s prison doing insight oriented psychotherapy in a group format. My method contributed to a 52% reduction in recidivism, a result orthodox psychology texts say is impossible. I agree: If you use conventional insight-oriented therapy with inmates, insight oriented therapy will fail. But memories work is effective. For the first time the results of this five-year National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) will be discussed from the perspective of the person who created memories work.
Memories work focuses on the gold of Freud’s psychoanalytic process. Over 100 years after Freud’s treatise on dreams, I detail how key memories can be identified directly and much more rapidly, in as little as an afternoon, to understand our clients and ourselves, and, most importantly, to identify and resolve the issues which hold us back in our lives. We believe that memories work will open a new era in assessment and psychotherapy, exactly what we need in the 21st century.
Arnold R Bruhn