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De Mijolla points out the editing, screening, and falsifying characteristics of memory. He even claims that a memory, in becoming conscious, can only be a "lie" with respect to the historicity of the past event. A memory is a complex ensemble of multiple mnemic traces which pull in opposite directions. It offers a combination of images, sounds, and affects of which the original and pure state can only be mythical. Yet truth lies hidden in the folds of this complicated lie. For de Mijolla, the essential truth is that of the present of the subject and the situation in which the memory appears. The contemporary analyst is thus in a situation similar to Freud's when he realized that his patients were presenting fantasies as memories, for we must recognize that this fantasy aspect is characteristic of all memory. Viderman has recently argued against the historicity of the past as it is constructed or reconstructed in the course of a psychoanalysis. De Mijolla feels that even with the development of videotape recording which might someday provide an authentic and complete family archive, one would not find altered one iota the discourse of patients and the use they make of memories. In treatment, memories still must be seen as fantasies. The value of the reported memories as truth is secondary in analysis to the use the patient makes of them. De Mijolla questions whether an analyst is ever in a position to say definitively that the parents of his patient were "thus and so," or that "such and such an event occurred." Such a manner of speaking is a holdover from a prepsychoanalytic past in which the therapist was an exterior observer of events, making scientific medical observations. The