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It was with some excitement that I flicked through the pages of this book addressing the complex and contentious area of remembering childhood sexual abuse, as it unexpectedly also covered issues and authors of special interest to me: the relationship between the social and the personal; the concept of intersubjectivity; Marx and Hegel.
Prager seeks to bridge the chasm between psychology and sociology by giving an account of his analysis of Ms A. The youngest in a large working-class fundamentalist Christian family, she had a special relationship with her mother, a controlling, demanding woman. Her father, the subject of criticism in the family for his alcoholism, was withdrawn but at times verbally abusive. Key events in her childhood were the death of her grandmother when she was 2 and the death of an aunt when 7.
Ms A's mother died in the first year of the analysis and shortly afterwards she began to suspect she had been sexually abused by her father. Prager was struck by the contrast between the lucidity of Ms A's previously reported childhood memories and the relative vagueness and paucity of her description of sexual abuse. Despite feeling