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I would like to thank Dr Valeria Egidi Morpurgo for her bibliographical help and Amanda Watson for her editing of these notes.
Dear Sir,
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis is to be commended for its attention to issues regarding memory and neuroscience, illustrated by the space allocated to expositions on consciousness and memory in Volume seventy-nine, Part five. However, I was quite dismayed with the ‘Book Review Essay: The Recovered Memory Controversy’ by Mary Target (pp. 1015-1028). While some of her work was intellectually crisp, there were other areas which limped along, and some which were grossly misleading and/or unsupported by the data. This statement is a case in point: ‘On the analyst's side, why would he or she look for, or accept as accurate, the reporting of previously forgotten sexual abuse, given the evidence that such recovered memories are very likely to be mistaken?’ (p. 1025).
I would like to address and challenge this statement, and two others, for readers and the