ROBERT MICHELS
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psychoanalysis in the book. Its basic premise is that there is some close rela–
tionship between psychoanalytic thinking and the flood of interest in
recovered memories of child abuse. That is simply untrue. There has been a
great deal of interest in these memories among various kinds of mental
health therapists, feminists, and people worried about our society in gener–
al. They are concerned about child abuse, about the treatment of victims of
child abuse, about the possibility that some people who are abused don't have
clear memories of the abuse, and that some of those people may later regain
memories of the abuse, while others may believe they are regaining memo–
ries of previous abuse that in fact never occurred, and may, because of that,
do all kinds of dreadful things, attacking their parents or others who in fact
are innocent. Although there has been a lot of interest and writing on these
matters, very little of it has been by psychoanalysts, and very little of it is
even informed by psychoanalytic thinking.
There are a couple of reasons for this: One is that most psychoanalytic
patients are not drawn from the populations that are most likely to be vic–
tims or allegers of child abuse. Another is that most of the treatments
suggested for those problems are not predominantly psychoanalytic in
nature, they are informed by other traditions of psychotherapy. Probably the
most ironic reason, in terms of Crews's attack, is that through most of its his–
tory psychoanalysis has been attacked from the other side for being overly
ready to attribute memories of abuse to the elaborations of childhood fanta–
sy rather than to the recall of actual occurrences in childhood. That is, most
criticisms of psychoanalysis have argued that it undervalues the importance
of "real" childhood trauma rather than exaggerating it and discovers it when
it's not there. The recovered memory issue is a contemporary issue that says
something about our society, something about psychiatric treatment, and
something about the impact of childhood events on adult problems. But, in
fact, if there's an interaction with psychoanalysis it is that it points out the
relative failure of psychoanalysis, at least in some periods of its history, to pay
enough attention to the significance of real traumatic experiences in child–
hood and the pathology that results from them.
The reason for this goes back to a discovery that Freud made one hun–
dred years ago. He realized that accounts of trauma from some patients that
he had believed to be true were more likely vivid memories of childhood
fantasies, which patients reported and experienced as real but which, in fact,
never occurred. At that point, he shifted his attention from the actual trau–
matic events in the lives of some unfortunate children to the fantasies of
childhood which can be mistaken for memories of traumatic events and psy–
choanalysis as we know it today was born.
The fact that children are traumatized isn't a discovery of psychoanaly–
sis, although it is certainly important, and may be central to the lives of
