Patterns: Basic Units of Emotional Memory.

in psychoanalysis, we attempt to engage with one another in ways that enhance understanding. We tend to valorize the verbal domains, yet much of the information we seek may be relatively inaccessible to conscious awareness, obscured by trauma or by the early age at which the information was encoded. These types of information are stored within the body as sensory memories, in which it is through the patterns of the communications that meanings are derived. Affect, most particularly, is known through its patterns of prosody and intensity. Greater appreciation of the patterned forms that underlie emotional memory can help us to better locate ourselves within this infinitely complex and fertile realm of nonverbal understandings, and to learn to communicate these understandings in constructive ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]