ABSTRACT
The initial furore over the ‘false memory’ debates has subsided, although the consequences reverberate on (Frankland and Cohen, 1999). In this chapter I go beyond the polarisations of truth and falsehood that continue – of legal versus psychotherapeutic truth, and professional competencies versus disciplinary procedures1 – to discuss a set of dilemmas that remain concerning clinical practice. In this chapter, I draw upon my positions as an academic developmental psychologist and a psychotherapist to comment on these dilemmas and the particular configuration of their relations within current socio-political contexts. First, I consider some key political features the crisis threatens to obscure, as well as the specific conditions that made such contests around memory so prominent. Second, I suggest how such analyses may function in useful ways, not only to tighten up and strengthen therapeutic practices, but to promote reflection upon the place and space of therapy in memory-making – including (crucially) therapists’ own memorial practices. Third, I suggest that these reflective approaches intimate connections with other more explicitly political projects of recalling and transforming histories. Fourth, I draw out connections between psychotherapy training and the institutional dynamics around scientific ‘evidence’ and accountability that these debates set in motion. And finally, I attempt to reconfigure the current preoccupation with putting psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in the courtroom to broader social contexts concerning memorial practices and the culturally repressed histories of women, in particular of violence against refugee and minoritised women.
