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In November of 1994, the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (BPSI) presented a 2-day symposium entitled “New Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Treatment of Sexual Trauma.”1 The goal of this meeting was to create a forum in which some of the foremost contributors to the psychoanalytic literature in the area of sexual trauma could draw upon their work with infants, children, adolescents, and adults to explore
how childhood trauma becomes represented in the mind;
the unique pathogenicity of childhood sexual trauma;
problems of validation of patient memories and therapist reconstructions, including the possibility of false memories and their implications for treatment;
the analytic treatment of childhood sexual trauma and incest in children and adults; and
risk factors, subjective experience, pathological consequences, prevention and repair of patient-therapist sexual boundary violations.
The articles that follow represent the majority of the papers presented at the Boston Symposium. (Unfortunately, two additional presentations, those of Daniel Schacter, “Implicit Memory, Explicit Memory and False Memory: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective,” and Jody M. Davies, “On Memory and False Memory: Dissociation, Repression and Reality Testing in the Countertransference,” could not be included in the present volume.) Taken together, these contributions offer readers the opportunity to reflect upon the current state and