ABSTRACT
In his paper “Cognitive Development” (1968), Roger Money-Kyrle defines the aim of psychoanalytic treatment as enabling the patient to gain access to a knowledge he innately already knows, but for various reasons has warped or twisted. For instance, even in the analysis of apparently normal individuals he had observed that many possible versions of the parental intercourse may occur in dream material, “except the right one” (p. 417). In his view, the misrepresentation of the primal scene is only one example of the more general conflict between the human predisposition to discover the truth and the will to distort it. Therefore, for him the task of psychoanalysis is to help the patient to understand and overcome those emotional barriers that stand in the way of acknowledging psychic reality (see Money-Kyrle, 1971, p. 442).
