The Recovered Memories Controversy

Dear Sir,

Attempts to throw light on the murky waters of the recovered memory debate so often end up obscuring more than they reveal. Moreover, theorising designed to insulate psychoanalysis from the controversy may do so at the expense of foreclosure of important elements—and may indeed offer a false solution.

I refer to Fonagy's guest editorial on ‘Memory and the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis’ (IJPA, 80:215-23) and Brenneis's review of my book Remembering Trauma. A Psychotherapist's Guide to Memory and Illusion (IJPA, 80:614-16).

Although helpful and clarifying in many ways, Fonagy's sophisticated theorising may actually function to eclipse certain issues in relation to psychoanalysis and memory. For example, he appears to confuse recovery of memory with the reconstruction of childhood development on the basis of transference—as in the following remarks:

‘Notwithstanding Kris's (1956) revolutionary reformulation of the psychoanalytic understanding of memory, the majority of ego-psychologists have continued to place emphasis on the therapeutic efficacy of reconstruction …’ (p. 215) and ‘it is hard to envision the formulation of an accurate reconstruction on the basis of a patient's distorted memories and symptoms’ (p. 216).

By implication, therefore, he suggests that those psychoanalysts who place emphasis on reconstruction of childhood are ‘recovered memory therapists’. But reconstruction is not about recovery of memory. It is concerned with building a picture of the patient's childhood development. Freud's classic example of reconstruction of the Wolf Man's childhood was an instance not of a patient's recovered memory but the analyst's reconstruction of a complex infantile neurosis. The ‘psychical object’, which Freud, in his 1937 paper on ‘Constructions in analysis’, considers to be potentially available for reconstruction because ‘all the essentials are preserved’ (p. 260) is not a memory but an earlier mental organisation—this is surely the meaning of the ‘a