ABSTRACT
Rachel Whiteread, the sculptor, wins the competition to build a Holocaust memorial for Vienna's Judenplatz. Local shopkeepers complain the memorial will deprive their customers of parking. Anthony Minghella, a script-writer and film-maker with a number of small film successes in England, spends four years convincing nervous financiers that his script of the 'unfilmable' novel, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, is a worthwhile investment. Sri Lankan sapper, Canadian nurse and Italian-Canadian thief circle around an English patient whose memory finally reveals a distinctly un-English identity, and a story which blurs the categories of nation, ally or enemy. In terms of plot, memory is revealed as the index of identity, the provider of narratives of location, for without it the amnesiac patient is misrecognised and misplaced. The spread of Recovered Memory Therapy (RMT) is usually associated with the publication of Ellen Bass and Laura Davis's self-help book The Courage to Heal in 1988.
