
On the molecular and neuroanatomical levels there is increasing evidence that many early developmental as well as adult-generated neurons have a time-limited existence in the brain that is correlated with the growth and decay of memory and its transformations via psychotherapy (Rossi, 2002). Living memory is a process of construction and reconstruction over time. This malleability or plasticity of memory may be the bane of oral history and the legal profession, but I propose that it contains the essential psychobiological seed of therapeutic hypnosis and psychotherapy as well as many alternative and complementary approaches to medicine that involve the ideodynamic action hypothesis of suggestion. Current neuroscience research, for example, documents how the classical process of Pavlovian fear conditioning requires the recall and re-activation of a conditioned memory before it can be extinguished and/or reconstructed at the gene expression and protein synthesis level as demonstrated experimentally by Nader et al. (2000 a & b). Nader et al. (2000 a) summarize their research with these words, “Our data show that consolidated fear memories, when reactivated, return to a liable state that requires de novo [gene expression] and protein synthesis for reconsolidation. These findings are not predicted by traditional theories of memory consolidation (p.723, italics added).
Nader, K., Schafe, G., & Le Doux, J. (2000 b). The labile nature of consolidation theory. Nature Reviews: Neuroscience, 1, 216-219.