Children, False Memories, and Disciplinary Alliances: Tensions between Developmental Psychology and Psychoanalysis

This paper explores areas of apparent convergence between psychotherapeutic and psychological analyses in the current focus on children's memories and memories of childhood inside (and outside) therapy. While psychology, and developmental psychology in particular, is an attractive ally for psychotherapy, four problems are identified with this alliance. First, insofar as there is a genuine convergence of topic between developmental psychology and psychoanalysis, this is at the expense of radically impoverishing the representation of the psychotherapeutic enterprise. Second, these common theoretical resources work, alongside popular psychology and therapy texts, to create a rhetorical elision between children's memories and the work of recollection, including recollections of childhood, in therapy. This helps to fuel the mistaken connections between research on children's

memorial fallibility and claims of recovered memories in therapy. Third, the drive toward professional alliances (against irresponsible malpractitioners) not only accords psychology (including developmental psychology) a scientific credibility that is at best partial, but also obscures a history of tension and contest between psychology and psychoanalysis. Fourth, practical and ethical as well as interpretive constraints on research on child suggestibility, are discussed to indicate its limitations and correspondingly misplaced received credibility in the arena of memorial accountability.