So, if it were not Jones, who Else would it be?: Reply to Commentaries

For when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigie.

Answering criticisms and comments by Gabbard and Makari, the author restates the considered position that underpins his paper. Drawing from recent discourses of child sexual abuse, feminist legal theory, poetics, rhetoric, and historiography, the author challenges assumptions still widely held by the psychoanalytic community. The concept of “persecuted speech” suggests new ways of reading between the lines of official psychoanalytic texts and offers possibilities for reclaiming the stories of “others,” like Fanny Harrigan and Dorothy Freeman, who have been excluded from the psychoanalytic discourse. Although the girls' allegations against Jones are compelling, the author continues to refuse to pronounce on Jones's innocence or guilt. Declining to be caught into these polarities, the author concludes by posing this question: Given that Jones had/has such a profound effect on psychoanalysis, and given that he has attracted little critical biographical attention, how has Jones become “possibly the least likeable figure in the early history of psychoanalysis? (Makari, this issue).