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PARTISAN REVIEW
Copernicus demonstrated that he is not the center of the universe, and
Darwin that he is not the ultimate result of evolution, but he doesn't even
control what goes on
in
his mental life. I'm sure that that is a fundamental and
vital basis for negative feelings. However, it isn't new, and therefore can't
explain recent changes. No one who wants to be loved by mankind should
go into the business of disclosing their hidden secrets.
Aileen Ward:
You kept returning to the question of why Crews was so
angry, which I find very interesting. Something else has happened to change
Crews's attitude and perhaps many other people's attitudes, outside of the
psychoanalytic community. Psychoanalysis is taking on a social dimension that
it did not have thirty years ago. By this I mean not simply the patient-analyst
relationship or the intellectual underpinnings of the method, but that quite
apart from anything the analysts ever intended, it has become implicated in
certain social phenomena. I don't know
if
any of you have heard about the
Little Rascals scandal.
It
has been, I think, seven years in the running.
An
entire community has been affected by the misuse of psychoanalysis in the
recovery of repressed memories. Individual families have been blasted. I think
this is something we can't help but be troubled by, the extent to which the
repressed memory theory has been used as a lever to produce these scandals.
Robert Michels:
I am not familiar with that particular episode. I said earli–
er that to my knowledge the impact of psychoanalysis on the issue of
memories of childhood abuse has largely been cautionary. It is psychoanalysis
that acquainted us with the possibility of false memory, it is psychoanalysis
that insisted on the centrality of the relationship in which the memory is
recovered to our understanding of it rather than assuming that that relation–
ship is neutral and the memory is simply a record of what happened.
Psychoanalysis explained the principles by which memories are transformed
and modified so that the adult memory is significantly changed from the
childhood event. To me it is psychoanalysis that has given us the clinical
strategies and intellectual equipment for emphasizing the reason to be cau–
tious about regarding memories as data about the past. In fact, it has been
severely attacked by those who are sympathetic to victims of child abuse and
who fear that psychoanalysis undercuts their arguments by weakening the evi–
dence that consists of memories. I don't understand Crews's or others'linking
of false memory problems to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has been the
intellectual argument against false memories.
Aileen Ward:
I accept your distinction: this is a misuse of psychoanalysis, it
doesn't take the prestige of psychoanalysis to make this kind of widespread
abuse possible.
