Response

Dear Sir,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to respond to Dr Chefetz's letter about my book review essay on the Recovered Memory Controversy. I would also like to thank Dr Chefetz for raising criticisms that would be, I am sure, shared by many psychoanalysts. I respect these views and the clinical experience which informs them, and I hope it will become clear that the contrast between our views is less sharp than he assumes. However, while accusing me of bias and distortion, Dr Chefetz used rhetoric and caricature of my views (including views I did not express), sometimes in preference to reasoned debate. Anyone who might doubt the accuracy of a patient's newly recovered memories is charged with showing a non-analytic stance. Yet one key to Freud's great discoveries is the close scrutiny of seemingly obvious facts, the search for complex explanations where the mind (and perhaps the patient) would have us accept simple answers. The approach shown in Dr Chefetz's letter polarises and personalises the discussion in a way that almost always seems to happen in this particular controversy, and that seems to me worthy of considerable reflection. I will consider the important points he made about technique and the clinical situation, after responding—within the space available —to his comments on my understanding of the material reviewed.

Dr Chefetz first seeks to illustrate the sloppy scholarship of some parts of the essay (sometimes ‘grossly misleading and/or unsupported by the data’), saying that ‘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 am not clear why the offending ‘statement’ (in fact, deliberately, a question, aiming to explore doubts such as those he raises) is a case of misleading and unsupported assertions. It might have been the reference to ev