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The Letter, Issue 15, Spring 1999, Pages 125 - 137 MEMORY AND PHANTASY * Barry O'Donnell There is a presupposition in the term 'false memory syndrome' that there are memories that are true and memories that are false; that a false memory is something fabricated and that it therefore has no bearing on the truth; and what is fabricated is described as 'phantasy'. This approach distinguishes memory and phantasy so that their content is taken to be mutually exclusive. A consideration of some texts of Freud problematises this set of assumptions and in the end renders them untenable. The aim of this contribution to today's debate is to present something of what Freud says of the relations between 'memory' and 'phantasy' so that the status we grant to childhood events recollected in analysis may be called into question. ***** In 1899 Freud wrote a paper entitled Screen Memories. What follows is the example that Freud gives of a seemingly trivial recollection from childhood which popped into a particular man's mind from time to time during his adult years for no identifiable reason: I see a rectangular, rather steeply sloping piece of meadow- land, green and thickly grown: in the green there are a great number of yellow flowers - evidently common dandelions. At the top end of the meadow there is a cottage and in front of the cottage door two women are standing chatting busily, a peasant-woman with a handkerchief on her head and a children's nurse. Three children are playing in the grass. One of them is myself (between the age of two and three); the others are my boy cousin, who is a year older than me, and his sister, who is almost exactly the same age as I am. We are picking the yellow flowers and each of us is holding a bunch of flowers we have already picked. The little girl has the best bunch; and, as though by mutual agreement, we - the two boys - fall on her and snatch away her flowers. She runs up the meadow in tears and as a consolation the peasant-womangivesherabigpieceofblackbread. Hardly have we seen this than we throw the flowers away, hurry to the cottage and ask to be given some bread too. And we are in fact given some; the peasant-woman cuts the bread with a long knife. In my memory the bread tastes quite delicious - and at that point the scene breaks off. [2]

The Letter, Issue 15, Spring 1999, Pages 117 - 124 RECOVERED MEMORIES/FALSE MEMORIES: A PSYCHIATRIC PERSPECTIVE Peter Byrne Introduction False memory syndrome (FMS), as a concept, is a complete misnomer. As it describes a situation where someone reports a version of events which did not happen, it is not a memory. When we first challenged its status as a 'syndrome', [1] commenting that it had been elevated to the status of syndrome by the media and pressure groups rather than mental health professionals, we drew a sharp response from both the US and UK FMS pressure groups. [2] [3] The use of the word ’false' in the title can also be criticised: when an amputee describes pain in the missing limb, the condition is called a phantom limb, not false limb syndrome. Evenpsychiatric conditions where the patient tells lies, pseudologa fantastica and Munchausen's syndrome, have a softer ring to them than false memory syndrome. Not only has the term FMS become widely acceptable in scientific and professional circles, but it has become the starting point for discussions about child sexual abuse, the value of and basis for psychotherapy and latterly, psychiatry. The Either/Or Discourse The FMS debate has frequently been reduced to two positions: the allegation of child sexual abuse (CSA) is true, and circumstances have prevented disclosure until adult life, or the allegation is false, and may have been encouraged by the process of psychotherapy. Both views are sustainable, although extremes of each position exist and are easily discredited. Our experience [4] identified many instances where an allegation of CSA was made and subsequently withdrawn: psychiatric diagnoses included psychosis, depression, learning disability, intoxication, undue influence by another person and hysteria (in its classic sense). One of our cases had epilepsy, and experiences 'more real than memories' have also been documented in people who had parts of their cerebral cortex artificially stimulated. [5] It became clear to us that FMS was possible (not certain) in only a minority of the fourteen cases we studied. With one exception (a patient with vague recollections who had a chemical abreaction procedure which preceded a series of complex allegations), all cases presented with the CSA allegation, and could not be said to have been inspired by the process of psychotherapy or their psychotherapist.

The Letter, Issue 15, Spring 1999, Pages 100 - 116 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SEDUCTION AND FALSE MEMORIES * Maeve Nolan Ever since the very first psychoanalytic patient, Anna O, who had been unable to drink for six weeks, recalled her disgust at the sight of a dog drinking from a glass, the role of forgotten memories in the generation of symptoms became part of psychoanalytic theory. Ever since Elisabeth and Lucy revealed the erotic conflict at the heart of their distress, psychoanalysis has concerned itself with unacceptable sexual desires on the part of the patient. And ever since Anna O cried out 'Dr. B's child is coming' at the end of her treatment with Dr. Breuer the seductiveness of the therapeutic process has been impossible to deny. Anna, Elisabeth and Lucy are some of the case histories making up Studies on Hysteria written in 1893. [2] It was as a result of these case histories that the authors, Breuer and Freud concluded that the body speaks and that 'hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences'. One hundred years on, at the close of another century, the same themes of forgotten memories, sexual desire, seduction, and the power of the therapeutic process have come to the fore again in the devastating phenomenon of recovered memories of sexual abuse. This time however, the diagnosis of hysteria is no longer available and instead of daughters nursing sick fathers we have daughters cutting off contact with debased father figures accused of outrageous acts of sexual and satanic abuse. The often idealised father of the 1890's has become the debased, abusing father of the 1990's.

The Letter, Issue 15, Spring 1999, Pages 97 - 99 'False' Memory Syndrome and 'Recovered Memory' Therapies INTRODUCTION Anthony McCarthy At a conference entitled The Logic of Phantasy it is timely that some space be given over to a discussion of the issues raised by the phenomenon known as False Memory Syndrome. The three papers presented here on the subject all approach the problem from different angles but come to similar conclusions. The False Memory Syndrome debate has arisen almost a hundred years after Freud's first psychoanalytic writings. The central issue has been highly publicised in the media. It has been alleged that patients in therapy have developed memories of having been sexually abused in childhood which are false, that is, the abuse did not occur. The result has been an attack on all forms of psychotherapy including psychoanalysis and a questioning of fundamental psycho­ analytic concepts such as repression. All three papers here suggest a return to Freud and in particular to his writings about the relationship between memory and phantasy.

The Letter, Issue 15, Spring 1999, Pages 90 - 96

The Letter, Issue 15, Spring 1999, Pages 84 - 89 EXCHANGE-VALUE AND USE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS Tony Hughes One of the topics dealt with in the seminar on the Logic of Phantasy concerns the question as to whether or not, at the level of the unconscious, we are structured as male or female subjects. In order to tease out this idea Lacan initially refers to Marx's discussion on the value and its subsystem of use-value and exchange-value. In order to give an understanding of Marx, I believe it best to let him speak for himself, for it is not possible for me to gild that lily. Use-value derives from the material properties of a commodity, such as the ability of a watch to tell the time, or a car to get us to our destination. Exchange-value is related to use-value in a quantitative relation and represents the proportion in which the use- value of one commodity is exchanged for the use-value of another commodity. This relation changes constantly with time and place and appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, that is, an exchange value that is inseperably connected with the commodity, inherent in it, seems a contradiction in terms. If, for example, a kilo of wheat is exchanged for x boot-polish, y silk or z gold etc., this is in effect done so in the most diverse proportions. Therefore, the wheat has many exchange values instead of one. But x boot-polish, y silk or z gold, must be mutually replaceable or of identical magnitude. It follows from this that valid exchange-values of a particular commodity express something equal, and secondly, exchange-values cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the form of appearance of a content distinguishable from it. Let us now take two commodities, for example corn and iron. Whatever their exchange values may be, it can always be represented by an equation in which a given quantity of com is equated to some quantity of iron, for instance one kilo of corn = x kilos of iron. What does this equation signify? It signifies that a common element of identical magnitude exists in two different things, in 1 kilo of corn and similarly in x kilos of iron. Both are therefore equal to a third thing, which in itself is neither one nor the other. Each of them, so far as its exchange-value must be reducible to this third thing.

The Letter, Issue 15, Spring 1999, Pages 71 - 83 BERGLER’S BASIC NEUROSIS Patricia Stewart We have been talking here today of phantasy, and of its central place, in all its different forms, in psychoanalysis. As we know, phantasy is a signifier which immediately invokes another, which stands in a sort of antithesis to it, reality. Phantasy involves a kind of imaging that does not have a simple direct link to a current or past reality and we know that desire is implicated in its creation. In the papers which follow this one, on the false memory debate, we will no doubt hear about what happens when therapies adopt a naive pragmatic approach to technique, with insufficient theoretical underpinnings. False memory syndrome is one consequence of a confusion and a scandalously sloppy theorisation concerning the status of a patient’s discourse and the place of phantasy within it. The recent furore over false memory emphasises how important it is to continue to examine critically and develop our techniques and their underlying theoretical foundations. And it is to this question of foundations that Dr. Bergler turns in the work that I am introducing here today, which he ambitiously entitled The Basic Neurosis, first published in 1949 [this edition, 1977]. On nosology in psychoanalysis, Bergler has the following to say: I sometimes get an impression very much as if scholars were to describe forms assumed by the sand of the desert under the influence of the desert wind and yet forget that at bottom they are after all dealing with sand. The forms assumed by the sand may very well be manifold, but if one wants to know the chemical composition of the sand, he will not be made any the wiser if in place of the formula for the different sand he is in sober earnest served up with the many descriptive forms of sand as chemical formulas. [1]

The Letter, Issue 15, Spring 1999, Pages 61 - 70 ELIZABETH, - THE VIRGIN QUEEN AND THE MAID (A consideration of the hysteric's homosexuality as faithfulness to the Original One, and of the place of the father in it) Helena Texier In the recently released movie version of the life of Queen Elizabeth the First, there are two scenes which when taken together can serve as a point of attachment for a consideration of what is at stake in the case of female hysteria. We can find a justification for seeing these quite separate scenes as inextricably linked in virtue of the presence in both of them of the same man. And if in each scene he appears to dominate, being the active, virile member of each scenario, then this only covers over the truth, - that what happens ultimately unfolds between two women and the man is merely the go-between. In the first scene we witness this young man engaged in a gentle seduction of the Queen, a tender, loving and sensual approach to her, a love-making which amounts to nothing else than an adoration of her body. In a later scene we witness the same young knave engaged in something altogether different with the Queen's cheeky young maid, who is not an unwilling partner. For the occasion she is decked out in one of the Queen's instantly recognisable gowns. Making 'love' is far from what he has in mind; he is ... and nothing will be gained by being coy about it ... he is fucking her. And what does the maximisation of his enjoyment depend upon, - what further demand does he make of her? Well, he begs of her: 'Say you are Elizabeth! Say you are Elizabeth!'. All the requirements being met with, the scene proceeds towards its climax, literally in this case! And it is exactly at this point of penetration and orgasm that something unexpected, something disastrous takes place. Where we expect ecstatic murmurings, erotic groans, there emerges instead a horrendous shriek of pain, a terrifying screaming from the maid.

The Letter, Issue 15, Spring 1999, Pages 51 - 60 THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THE SEXUAL ACT (Some thoughts on perversion and obsessional neurosis) Patricia McCarthy Introduction This does not sound like a title that makes sense, and clearly it doesn't make sense at the level of what we, ordinarily, take the sexual act to be, that is, at the social or human level. However at the level of the subject, the sexual act is silence. There is a syncopation of signifiers when it comes to dealing with what is involved in sex. To syncopate a word is to shorten it by dropping out an interior letter or syllable, for instance the word 'never' becoming 'ne'er'. The structural syncopation in meaning at the level of the unconscious, is already a consequence of a logic that sets the subject up. Can such a lofty theorisation have clinical relevance? To define the subject in terms of the difficulty of the sexual act is, hopefully, to allow us pinpoint more clearly, where on the path of difficulty, the neurotic or perverse subject places himself. Over all of this, the status of the analytic act hangs suspended ... ***** In crime thrillers, the serial killer often turns out to be someone who is at the heart of the investigative team and more often still is someone of whom it is later remarked 'Of course it had to be him! Look at the way he always straightened up the telephone directories or how neatly he arranged the files on his desk!' In this escapist scenario, we don't readily have to recognise aspects of ourselves in the investigator/serial killer. In relation to an unwitting individual who comes to see him, and who pays him with florins that have been previously laundered, Freud is quick to locate the displacement, from hands dirty from handling young girls' genitals to hands which handle only clean money. The individual in question, of course, fled - and understandably so. Who of us wants to be told the truth about ourselves? The point of this strange overlapping between perverse and obsessional activity is that it might allow us grapple with an impossible title about a so-called impossible act - the sexual act.

The Letter, Issue 15, Spring 1999, Pages 1 - 50 ACCORDING TO MARCEL DUCHAMP La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même and the ready-made Lieven Jonckheere* I. From psychoanalysis to Duchamp ... and back When he found himself in a clinical deadlock, Freud often turned to art. Being a Freudian, like Lacan, I will try to tackle the problem of the fundamental sexual fantasy at the end of the analytic cure, by turning to an artist you all know, namely Marcel Duchamp. Indeed, I think Duchamp can teach something to a psychoanalyst about the fantasy - the means of finding a way out of it. The fantasy according to psychoanalysis But first of all, what is the fundamental fantasy, according to Freud and Lacan? For the time being I will define it in the most classical way: as a kind of play, a scene, or scenario - permanently produced on what Freud calls the Other Stage, in the unconscious. This scene deals with a specific situation, in which we ourselves are not involved in a direct or active manner; we only witness it, as a passenger - as if seeing something in a window display. Mostly this view can be summarised in one single sentence, this sentence being the only thing we can tell about our fantasy, be it with much feelings of shame. You may know the Freudian paradigm of such a fundamental fantasy, 'A child is being beaten', to be completed as 'A child is being beaten - and that's all I know'.

The Letter, Issue 15, Spring 1999, Pages i - iii

The Letter, Issue 14, Autumn 1998, Pages 165 - 181 WE CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE Helena Texier (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. The perceived 'danger' of the 'talking cure' appears to follow, as far as I can gather, from two points; firstly, in that there is no measurable, empirical basis on which to make a judgement with regard to the status, the 'reality', of anything that is produced as memory; secondly, that the psychiatrist risks leaving himself open to being implicated in the production of such 'false memories' (for example, that his method involves suggestion, an 'implantation' of memory) and therefore open to the possibility of being sued by someone falsely accused of abuse or, indeed by a patient, traumatised by memories, by-products of therapy which would not have arisen were it not for the treatment. Ostensibly then, although there is mention of the trauma caused to the patient or those falsely accused, the 'danger' is really one posed for the psychiatrist; firstly, in that the very ground of his field, the reliance on empirical method, finds itself challenged by a speaking subject; secondly, insofar as there is a risk to his bank-balance, reputation, etc. Best to leave well enough alone.

The Letter, Issue 14, Autumn 1998, Pages 161 - 164 UNE TORPEUR ORDINAIRE Christiane Lacôte Le jeune homme partit pour l'étranger. C'était une demi-solution et il le savait un peu, puisque l'étranger n'est que la figure compacte de ce que Lacan désigne de son incomplétude même, le grand Autre. Mais cette figure dégradée de l'Autre était aussi pleine que l'objet que sa jouissance consommait et cette symétrie n'était pas encore rompue. ***** Aujourd'hui, dans nos contrées, la souffrance n'est plus de mise. Tant mieux, en un sens. Il est admis qu'elle n'est plus rédemptrice et qu'un monde meilleur ne nous attend plus en récompense de nos peines. La souffrance ne se tisse plus avec une espérance religieuse, elle est un mal radicalement.

The Letter, Issue 14, Autumn 1998, Pages 134 - 160 LACAN AND DALI - AN ANAMORPHIC ENCOUNTER? Olga Cox Cameron 'What fun I might have had Lacan's half-mocking, backward look at his early years from the vantage point of 1966, pinpoints his much publicised connection with Salvador Dali as a stopover, left long behind in his own intellectual odyssey. On the occasion of the publication of a first extract from Paul Duquenne's translation of Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness , in the psychoanalytic journal Cahiers pour L'Analyse, Jacques Alain Miller invited Lacan to write an introduction. Lacan took advantage of this opportunity to review the trajectory of his own thought on psychotic structures and, typically, to flatten out the importance of 'connaissance paranoïaque' , signalled as crucial in the article in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis o f May 1951. What a fine career as an essayist I could have made for myself using this theme which lends itself to all kinds of aesthetic variations! One has only to think of all that our friend Dali has done with it. The doctoral thesis had theorised 'le cas Aimée a s 'a developmental fixation at the level of the superego', but the slow working over of Aimée's story in the years immediately following 1932 offered Lacan a number of other salient elements which would reappear, metamorphosed, in the 1960's. Aimée's relationship with her elder sister, described in 1933 as haine amoureuse is a disturbed doubling which radically subverts the stability of the narcissistic image. Furthermore, this anomaly in subjective structure is identical to that found to be at the basis of certain homicidal attacks, which the psychiatrist Guiraud had described as unmotivated murders. These acts, frequently carried out in twilight states, and of which the perpetrator has no clear memory; 'reveal a specific anomaly identical to that found in psychosis'. Thirdly this anomaly is characterised by certain types of pre- logical conceptual structures, which account for 'the often remarkable aesthetic creations produced in psychotic states'.

The Letter, Issue 14, Autumn 1998, Pages 120 - 133 LECTURE RAISONNÉE ET CRITIQUE DES OEUVRES DE FREUD ET DE LACAN Charles Melman 4e année, Séminaire du 8 octobre 1998 à mon cher Cormac Gallagher, en témoignage d'amitié Certains d'entre vous ont peut-être eu connaissance d'un document que je vous ai apporté ce soir, parce que je trouve ces phénomènes assez intéressants pour ouvrir le séminaire cette armée. Je ne sais pas si la presse, si les média, chez nous, en ont parlé. Il s'agit d'une exposition qui a eu lieu au Musée de la Technique et du Travail de Mannheim, ville allemande d'une certaine importance. Cette exposition s'intitule Les mondes du corps>regards dans le corps humain et comprend ... deux cents cadavres qui ont subi un traitement spécial la 'plastination' inventée par Monsieur Gunter von Hagens. Ce monsieur a donc réuni deux cents cadavres qui sont des écorchés dont la musculature est remarquablement mise en évidence, dont parfois la calotte crânienne est retirée, ce qui permet de voir les hémisphères cérébraux. Lorsqu’il s’agit de malades, Monsieur von Hagens s'est arrangé pour qu'on puisse voir directement l'organe malade, le foie, le coeur, les poumons. Cette exposition a eu sept cent mille visiteurs à Mannheim ... Ce qui entre autres choses assure un certain bien-être matériel à Monsieur Gunter von Hagens, d'autant que, après le succès considérable ainsi rencontré, elle est immédiatement partie vers où? Le... Japon!

The Letter, Issue 14, Autumn 1998, Pages 106 - 119 PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS - A SCIENTIFIC PARADIGM Tom McGrath In a world becoming increasing dominated by information technology it might appear to be the case that what was involved here was a kind of final frontier of science-inspired technology taking over and controlling the coding and transmission of that most human of commodities, namely information. It is after all something that is about people, and contained by people and something we seek from people however indirectly. That the word, information, should become to be so frequently associated with technology is a mark of the extent to which society has become increasingly objective and technical as science marches on, and impacts, apparently more and more, on all aspects of life mediating human interaction to an ever increasing extent. It raises the question about the threatened place of the human subject in such an increasingly technical world in a new way, and gives rise to common anxieties about the control of that world and the place of the individual - perhaps unknowing - subject within it. It is perhaps true to say that a majority of individuals have little enough understanding of the technologies which increasingly influence their lives and options, and experience a degree of alienation and dependence hither to unknown. It is as though their lives were being controlled and managed by forces which are beyond their understanding, forces to which they are subjected, and by which they are managed.