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“The danger of our leading a patient astray by suggestion, by persuading him to accept things which we ourselves believe but which he ought not to, has certainly been enormously exaggerated … I can assert without boasting that such an abuse of ‘suggestion’ has never occurred in my practice” (Freud, quoted by Brenneis, 161).
When Augustine started writing his Confessions, he viewed his life as a prism refracting the greater glory of God. C. Brooks Brenneis has also written a confession of sorts, though it might be said to lie more properly in the tradition of doctor-scientists who test their hypotheses upon themselves. The sequence was reversed in his case: he was initially “infected” with a countertransferential fantasy, which he only slowly and deliberately liquidated by strenuous self-questioning, peer supervision, and studious reading. In the process, he relates, “I learned many things I did not know, and worse, many things I thought I knew but did not” (15).
The structure of his book allows the reader to recapitulate his personal pathway, from original belief in the possibility of recovering repressed memories of childhood sexual trauma in the course of therapy, to “incremental” doubting as he scrutinized the relevant research. At the outset, Dr. Brenneis took for granted “that I was a reasonably informed and well-trained analytic therapist” (xii). By the end, he considered himself not alone in a surprising ignorance of abundant empirical and theoretical literature that can inform and strengthen the quality of clinical work.
The example of “Grace” pulls the reader into the maelstrom of an intense transferential and counter-transferential encounter that led him to the gradual reconstruction of an unremembered trauma. Elements of his description match a pattern found in other studies of recovered memory (Mersky 1996). First, a combination of a well-meaning but over-involved psychotherapist and an intelligent but highly suggestible patient, created a hothouse in which