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It has long been taken for granted within psychoanalysis and its theoretically derived therapies that therapy involves, at least partly, the uncovering of repressed material, its detailed examination—the working-through process—and eventual integration. The bitter, passionate debate on the repressed memory syndrome has been a formidable challenge to some of these theoretical and procedural assumptions and furthermore has serious legal implications. The debate has been sharpened by patients' frequently traumatic histories and indeed by the ever-more prevalent diagnosis of PTSD.
A book such as Recovered Memories of Abuse: True or False? which attempts and succeeds—in my eyes—in offering a dispassionate clarification of this controversy is thus a most welcome contribution to our professional field.
The book is especially valuable because of its distinguished editors, both leading figures in international psychoanalysis. The recently deceased Joseph Sandler was Emeritus Professor of Psychoanalysis at University College London, with Peter Fonagy his successor. Sandler was also first Freud Professor of Psychoanalysis at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and editor of several major psychoanalytic journals, and Fonagy is also Director of Research at the Anna Freud Centre in London and Director of the Child and Family Center at the Menninger Foundation, Topeka, Kansas.
These positions deserve to be highlighted, since neither Sandler, nor Fonagy appear here as “orthodox Freudians”—some might even call them “revisionists,” although I do not like these religious-sounding formulations. It is in Part II that the editors put their stamp on the book. Sandler, and his coauthor Anne-Marie Sandler, also a leading English psychoanalyst and former Director