ABSTRACT
During the 1980s the accusation most commonly made by feminists against
psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice was that it denied the reality of
sexual abuse, so sentencing ‘thousands of patients to confused, guilty
silence, while exonerating the abusers’ (Scott 1988). But by the early 1990s
a fierce public debate was raging on whether psychotherapists might be so
keen to discover sexual abuse that they would encourage impressionable
patients to fabricate fantasies about childhood incest. Within the world of
psychoanalytic psychotherapy there have been dramatic swings between
theories that assume that patients’ accounts of sexual abuse derive from
unresolved Oedipal desire, and those that assume that the patient is
describing a real event. These theoretical shifts reflect changing public
perceptions of the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse.
