Why bring up the past? Why, when what is going on now seems to be the problem? Answers come from students of the mind, such as psychologists and neuroscientists, and also from observers of the human condition, such as novelists, playwrights, and poets. Scientists and artists alike are aware of the intimate connections between the past and present. Some of their views will be offered here to help explain why psychotherapy evokes the past to work on the present. In short, they know that the past lives on in the present.
PAST AS SETUP
Lines from Shakespeare (1610-11), "what's past is prologue," and Wordsworth (1820),"The Child is father of the Man," refer to the influence of the past as setup for our present and future lives. One would be hard pressed to find a significant school of psychotherapy that doesn't posit developmental trajectories The psychologist Wachtel (1977) observed that quite a variety of psychological theories assert that early experiences are formative. Exploring our personal histories gives the opportunity for greater understanding of how we have gotten to be where we are.
Therapists writing currently echo the usefulness of this understanding in the treatment of current difficulties. McWilliams (2014), a psychodynamic psychologist, said that during therapist-patient conversations about what is going on in the office and in the patient's life outside, memories come up and are used to increase in-the -moment understanding. Wenzel (2014), a cognitive therapist, acknowledged that although her discipline is mostly present-focused, it can be useful to trace back the origins of maladaptive core beliefs about self, others, and the world. Holtforth et al (2007) argue that most cognitive-behavioral theorists promote genetic insight because they see the importance of insight into schemas of self and others formed from past experiences Even behavior therapy, probably the most ahistorical of therapies, cedes the clinical utility, when setting up treatment protocols, of identifying the initial experiences linking the unconditioned and conditioned stimuli in classical conditioning models and the onsets of problem behaviors and their consequences in therapies based on operant conditioning.
PAST AS REPLAY
Not only were some questionable patterns firmly established long ago, they can be replayed in our daily lives. Freud (1920), the father of psychodynamic therapy, observed this "perpetual recurrence of the same thing" (p.23), and called it the repetition compulsion. He thought that disturbances occuring earlier in life were repeated in order to find a way out, a better outcome. The repetition compulsion, in his opinion, was an active effort at mastery over something over which there had initially been no control. Unfortunately, however, all to often, the same behaviors only yield the same results.
Some of our greatest American writers have framed the repetition of the past with their own poetic words:
Scott Fitzgerald (1925): So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Eugene O'Neill (1943): There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.
William Faulkner (1951): The past is never dead, It's not even past.
Maroda (1999), a psychoanalyst, moved between the worlds of art and science as she described the enactments of the past in a playwright's language: There is a certain role that every person has learned and tends to act out over and over again, like a long-running play. Because our scripts also contain lines for all the other actors, who usually acquiesce under pressure and end up saying what we coach them to say, the past is easily repeated" (p.23).
PAST AS CHANGABLE
Another important reason to access the past is that it can be changed. Evidence for the mutability of memory comes from neuroscience. Changes comes from the assimilation of new experience available in the moments that memories are activated (Nader, Schafe, & LeDoux, 2000; Stern, 2014). The particular events remain intact but how they are remembered, especially their meanings, can shift.
There are psychotherapeutic approaches that are specifically geared toward the modification of memory. Shapiro's eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) techniques evoke specific memories, use bilateral stimulation to follow associated memory chains, and then prompt more positive, empowering thoughts and feelings that are to be incorporated into the original memories and bring positive changes. Emotion focused psychotherapy, a contemporary school of therapy, reconstructs negative memories that arise during the therapist-patient dialogue by deliberately activating their emotional content and facilitating the integration of more adaptive affects and more adult understanding (Greenberg, 2014).
The novelist and memoirist Winterson (2011) said, "In our inner world we can experience events that happened to us in time as happening simultaneously.... events separated by years lie side by side imaginatively and emotionally' (p. 153). What lies close together can interact and interaction brings change.
PAST AS NARRATIVE
We humans have probably been telling stories ever since we became capable of complex speech. First in oral form and then in written form as well, narratives have been important organizers of our lives. We carry our stories with us-the ones we have been told and the ones we have made up ourselves. These narratives, when well developed, relate what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen. They also tell who has been involved, when and where events occurred, and why. They tell who we are, define our self-identity.
When people seek psychotherapy, they bring with them their stories, which always include themes from the past, whether directly or indirectly. Some of these old stories have defined them in ways that are narrow, unvaried, and confining (Madigan, 2011). Psychotherapy can help with re-authoring these painful stories as the now older, more mature patient and the therapist collaborate to look again at the past.. This focused look at the material can create more complex, more compassionate, and more adaptive revisions. As Madigan (2011) observed, these revisions and their meanings can contribute to telling stories of strength and resilience. Together, patient and therapist, can make new stories that include more varied and flexible views of self and others.
Narrative therapists call the alternative narrative lines "restorying" (Angus & Greenberg, 2011; Madigan, 2011). Rushdie (1992), the essayist and novelist, well understood restorying. He said, "Those who do not have the power over the story that dominates their lives - the power to retell it, reexperience it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change - truely are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts."
CONCLUSION
The past is revisited as a therapeutic resource. It is a rich source of material. In earlier years lay the origins of deeply embedded emotions, thoughts, and habitual behaviors. They set in motion currents that can reverberate throughout the years to come. Unwittingly, patterns can be repeated, whether or not they are constructive and even though they represent younger, more immature versions of reality.
Psychotherapy can bring awareness of the setups and repetitions from the past. Understandings enables their deliberate reevaluation and interruption. Changing memories and restorying to reflect more mature renderings of what has happened are powerful tools as well. After all, new perspectives bring new possibilities.
But, again, an artist can say it best. Winterson (2011) observed, " Freud, one of the great masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead" (p.58). Or in another iteration on the theme of nonlinear time, she said, "Yes,the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need" (p. 144).
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