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Dear Editors,
I would like to comment on an assumption in Michael Good's recent letter on Julie's museum, one that with certain notable exceptions (e.g. Bohleber 2007) has remained largely unchallenged during the IJP's ongoing debate about the role of recovered memory in analysis (Fonagy, 1999, etc.). That assumption concerns the central importance to analysis of working in the transference/countertransference.
‘Screening’, writes Good, ‘can seductively divert the psychoanalytic endeavour from what is happening in the immediacy of the transference-counter transference and thereby constitute a defensive enactment, particularly when a particular reconstructive screen involving trauma is convincing to both patient and analyst’.
Leaving aside his conflation of Bion's beta screen with Freud's screen memory—which Lawrence Brown gently points out in his reply—what is Good actually saying here? Traumatic material arising in the course of an analysis, he seems to imply, should be distrusted as potentially seductive; while the sure ground of the transference/countertransference can be relied on. He goes on to reinforce this impression by suggesting that a diminishing emphasis on memory in an analysis may be an indicator of therapeutic progress.
Of course, it is possible to use memory defensively to evade uncomfortable feelings in the transference. But consider things for a moment from the perspective of a patient who is in the process of recovering a genuine traumatic memory. That memory might emerge first through a flashback, bodily symptom or post-traumatic nightmare in the form of β-elements that initially make little or no sense to either patient or analyst. Now if the analyst comments on the transference significance of these, in order to avoid being seduced by a screen, isn't the patient likely to conclude that this is because they are evoking unbearable feelings? In effect, the analyst is heard saying, ‘Let's not talk about your father raping you—let's talk about us’. The