Freud and False Memory Syndrome (Postmodern Encounters)

✍ Scribed by Phil Mollon

• Publisher: Totem Books
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 81
• Series: Postmodern Encounters
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Since about 1992, an astonishingly fierce scientific professional and legal controversy has arisen around the allegation that psychotherapists may sometimes have fostered false memories of childhood sexual abuse. Some have blamed Freud for this, arguing that he sowed the seeds of "false memory syndrome" 100 years ago. He has been accused by some critics of abandoning, out of professional cowardice, his original recongition of the prevalence of sexual abuse amongst his patients, substituting his theory of childhood sexuality and the Oedipus complex, and by others of fabricating and implanting false memories of abuse in his patientes' minds. Was Freud the bad father, impregnating society with misldeading ideas that a century later have given birth to a monster - or was he an astonishing genius, whose sophisticated understanding of memory was far ahead of his time? Much bashed, but rarely read, Freud continues to be urgently relevant to issues that preoccupy psychology and society today.

✦ Table of Contents

False Memory Syndrome......Page 4
Is Freud to Blame?......Page 8
Freud’sViews on Psychopathology......Page 9
Dammed up Libido......Page 11
A Burnt Pudding......Page 12
Disagreeable Scenes......Page 14
Pains in the Legs......Page 15
Commentary......Page 17
Freud’s Sexual Abuse Theory of Psychopathology......Page 18
The Two Trauma Theory......Page 20
A Fear of Shops......Page 21
Deferred Action......Page 22
A Bedtime Ritual......Page 24
A Case of Paranoia......Page 25
Positively Revolting......Page 29
The Aetiology of Hysteria......Page 30
Chains of Memory......Page 31
Repellent Scenes......Page 33
Reality of the Sexual Scenes?......Page 35
Could the Scenes be False Memories?......Page 39
Freud’s Abandonment of the ‘Seduction Theory’......Page 43
Sexual Abuse is ‘Common Enough’......Page 49
Memory in Dreams......Page 51
Screen Memories......Page 53
Freud on Reconstruction in Psychoanalysis......Page 58
Freud’s Concept of Repression......Page 61
Repression of What?......Page 63
Conclusion: Freud on Memory and Abuse......Page 64
Psychoanalysis since Freud......Page 66
What Happens in Psychoanalysis Today?......Page 68
A Caution Regarding False Memories......Page 69
Notes......Page 70
Bibliography......Page 75