Open to All Possibilities

I told her I was not in a position to know, but I was open to all possibilities. We would continue to explore.

Some patients now suspect during their psychotherapy that they might have been sexually abused as children (cf. Maguire 1995). The contemporary controversy over the validity of recovered memory while the patient is in treatment calls into question clinical and ethical issues, and so demands some thoughts on clarification and validation of psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic methods, and the significance of reconstruction and construction. This paper, based on clinical work with two patients, is a contribution to the discussion on assessment of emerging memories of abuse and some of the differing aspects of verification. In this article I use the word ‘true’ in the sense of ‘genuine’, and also use the concepts ‘psychic truth’ and ‘psychic reality’ interchangeably to refer to what happens within and between patient and therapist.

Publicity by the False Memory Society may lead therapists, attracted by scientism, to strive for the objective, definable and real. Yet it becomes quickly apparent that positivistic notions of validation have little relevance to the analytic encounter which is characterized and permeated by subjectivity and uncertainty. The practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is one where knowledge is seen in constant, dynamic evolution and transformation, and where the link between theory and practice demands elastic and flexible concepts (de Azevedo 1994). The encounter with the patient is primarily intersubjective, and so the shared therapeutic experience is the situation where analytic knowledge emerges through the transference, where reconstructions and constructions are formulated and where interpretations are validated.

Verifiable documentation of childhood sexual abuse, for example through hospital or social services records, is usually not available, and so the assessment and validation of the recovered memories take pla