Lichtenberg's reinterpretation suggests that the mother is repeating a procedural memory of her own unsuccessful feeding experiences early in life but now taking on the role of the aggressive partner, formerly played by her own mother. The recourse to procedural memory allows the author to postulate that events are being reenacted as they originally occurred, unchanged by such factors as internal conflict, fantasy, or recodification into language. If representations are treated as static rather than subject to dynamic fluctuations and such processes as condensation, displacement, and reversal, and if the original experiences are believed to be reproduced veridically, a mirror of the real, removed from a constantly shifting context of associations and experience, a powerful rationale is provided for the analyst to move beyond interpretation. The analyst might then seek to provide a counterpoint to the organizing representations or, responding humanely as to any other real event, to repair some hypothesized damage. At least part of any truly analytic inquiry must focus on the degree to which lived experience is not intersubjectively determined, to what extent external perception is overridden, and in what circumstances.
Patients frequently portray themselves as the victim of slights, cruelty, and deprivation.
If we fail to entertain the possibility that the present picture is but one of many competing representations now salient because external or internal factors have lowered the threshold for its activation, then we have little choice but to act. Additionally, there can be no refutation if early material is encoded in procedural memory rather than in language, which allows for consensual validation. Further problems are inherent in the author's postulation that anything infants do consistently, they are motivated to do. While this definition of motivation is close to that of academic psychologists, it fails to distinguish between motives and externally caused behaviors. The definition leaves unexplained the tenacious nature of object choices and the very special type of learning that enters into these highly cathected interactions.