Helena Texier – We Can Remember it for you Wholesale
 
THE LETTER 14 (Autumn 1998) pages 165-181
 
(When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
 
I summon up remembrance of things past,…)
 
‘What is human?’ and ‘What is reality?’.
 
It would seem, in the recent, albeit short-lived, furore caused in the field of psychiatry on their ‘discovery’ of ‘false memories’ in the course of talking cures, specifically in relation to sexual abuse, that these two questions seem to be causing that field some anxiety. I’ve elsewhere said that it is regrettable that psychiatry on this matter seems to lag behind psychoanalysis by more than one hundred years.1 But more regrettable still is the implication from some quarters of the establishment, generally the most vocal, that this ‘discovery* should be read as proof of the inherent danger of talking cures, as if the only adequate response to the new-found knowledge of the human subject is, precisely, to reinforce the science by firmly (fore)closing the door in its face.