Welcome to Issue 12 of The Letter, Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis.
 
Excerpt from the Editorial:
 
"Has Psychiatry no shame? This week an eminent British Journal of psychiatry published its finding on the subject of ‘false memory syndrome’ and ’recovered memory’ of sexual abuse during ‘talking cures’. While the level of naivete of the ensuing discussion in newspapers and on radio is to be expected, the way in which prominent psychiatrists here have used the finding to undermine confidence in psychotherapy, suggesting that while therapy was previously seen as quite probably useless but at least no harm for the suffering subject, that now this new study proves it positively dangerous! Such comments have succeeded in almost completely overshadowing the more obvious questions which psychiatry itself must answer, following on its research. Why, for example, has it taken one hundred years longer for psychiatry to cast doubt on the ‘seduction theory’ than it has for psychoanalysis? How can the bastions of psychiatry claim without embarrassment to have ‘discovered’ something which Freud was writing about a century ago? What explanation is it going to give for its findings? If it is going to rely on the old favourite – ‘suggesting’ suggestion on the part of the therapist – how is it going to explain the intricacies of this phenomenon? Will it be able to come up with something which would be equal in weight to the psychoanalytic concept of Transference?"
 
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