ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses from the original Memory in Dispute, Ann Scott looks at the role of language and speech in the false memory debate. Drawing on the psychoanalytic work of Henri Rey, she provides a careful linguistic analysis of the pain involved in the subject. In some cases, of course, the sense of the early experience will only be recovered in adult life; where this is then denied by the parents, the adult daughter is faced with a psychic gap, a further lack of containment: the original trauma is compounded by the trauma of a denial. At source, sexual abuse – whether real or imagined, always known, or reconstructed in adulthood – involves the skin and feelings about the skin and its sensations early in life, for before there is adult speech there is the bodily experience – actual, imagined or metaphorical.
