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Children, False Memories, and Disciplinary Alliances: Tensions between Developmental


Psychology and Psychoanalysis

Authors: Burman, Erica

Source: Psychoanalysis & Contemporary Thought, 1998; v. 21 (3), p307, 27p

ISSN: 01615289

Document Type: Article

Language: English

Abstract: This paper explores areas of apparent convergence between psychotherapeutic and psychological analyses in the
current focus on children's memories and memories of childhood inside (and outside) therapy. While psychology, and
developmental psychology in particular, is an attractive ally for psychotherapy, four problems are identified with this
alliance. First, insofar as there is a genuine convergence of topic between developmental psychology and
psychoanalysis, this is at the expense of radically impoverishing the representation of the psychotherapeutic enterprise.
Second, these common theoretical resources work, alongside popular psychology and therapy texts, to create a
rhetorical elision between children's memories and the work of recollection, including recollections of childhood, in
therapy. This helps to fuel the mistaken connections between research on children's memorial fallibility and claims of
recovered memories in therapy. Third, the drive toward professional alliances (against irresponsible malpractitioners) not
only accords psychology (including developmental psychology) a scientific credibility that is at best partial, but also
obscures a history of tension and contest between psychology and psychoanalysis. Fourth, practical and ethical as well
as interpretive constraints on research on child suggestibility, are discussed to indicate its limitations and
correspondingly misplaced received credibility in the arena of memorial accountability.

Accession PCT.021.0307A
Number:

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Children, False Memories, and Disciplinary Alliances: Tensions between Developmental


Psychology and Psychoanalysis

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American Accent
Erica Burman, PHD, author; Discourse Unit, Department of Psychology and Speech Pathology, Manchester Metropolitan University
Hathersage Road Manchester M13 OJA, United Kingdom
This paper explores areas of apparent convergence between psychotherapeutic and psychological analyses in the current focus on
children's memories and memories of childhood inside (and outside) therapy. While psychology, and developmental psychology in
particular, is an attractive ally for psychotherapy, four problems are identified with this alliance. First, insofar as there is a genuine
convergence of topic between developmental psychology and psychoanalysis, this is at the expense of radically impoverishing the
representation of the psychotherapeutic enterprise. Second, these common theoretical resources work, alongside popular psychology and
therapy texts, to create a rhetorical elision between children's memories and the work of recollection, including recollections of childhood, in
therapy. This helps to fuel the mistaken connections between research on children's memorial fallibility and claims of recovered memories
in therapy. Third, the drive toward professional alliances (against irresponsible malpractitioners) not only accords psychology (including
developmental psychology) a scientific credibility that is at best partial, but also obscures a history of tension and contest between
psychology and psychoanalysis. Fourth, practical and ethical as well as interpretive constraints on research on child suggestibility, are
discussed to indicate its limitations and correspondingly misplaced received credibility in the arena of memorial accountability.

The precipitating context for this paper is the current popular and professional concern over childhood abuse. At the core of debates about
children's reliability as witnesses and of contested claims about the possibility of recovering memories of previously forgotten childhood
events (whether inside and outside therapy), lies a common social trauma of childhood in crisis. That is, the notion of childhood as the
collective innocent past of the modern social imaginary, no less than the actual children who, at least in fantasy, instantiate this, is now
undergoing severe reevaluation (Stainton Rogers & Stainton Rogers, 1992; Alanen, 1995; Burman, 1997a, b, and in press). We are now
forced to admit that little boys murder, little girls (and boys) are sexually abused (and abuse); that children do not always tell the truth, and
that the truths of therapy may not always map onto legal polarities of verifiable truth and falsehood. If psychoanalytic psychotherapies have
rarely, if ever, made the latter claim, then the far-reaching grasp that current legal and popular preoccupations have on our minds should at
least give pause for thought: the U.S. courtroom TV drama writ large (see also Brown and Burman, 1997; Scott, 1997). All this only
becomes possible precisely because what is at stake in the determination of childhood memories and current children's memorial accounts
is the crisis in authenticity that children, and recollection of childhood in therapy, have come to represent.

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The historian Ludmilla Jordanova (1989) has highlighted the connections between notions of childhood and representations of nature and
society. More specifically, as Carolyn Steedman (1995) argues, the figure of the child is closely associated with the modern Western sense
of interiority, of inner true selfhood that forms the topic of contemporary psychotherapy: “The idea of the child was the figure that provided
the largest number of people living in the recent past of Western societies with the means of thinking about and creating a self: something
grasped and understood: a shape, moving in the body … something inside: an interiority” (p. 20).

Taking these broader cultural investments, as well as the current concern with professional practices as my starting point, my aim in the
rest of this paper is to evaluate the connections between research about (rarely “with”) children (Mayall, 1996) and the therapeutic
enterprise, in which notions of childhood experience figure so powerfully. I want to highlight the tenuousness of some of these connections,
not because I think there are no such connections, but because the current forms and uses of such convergences allow for some potent
confusions. The conflation between the “inner child” of therapeutic discourses and psychological accounts of childhood works to privilege
psychology's claims to scientific expertise; it bolsters the rescue narrative of reason and progress that has so manifestly disappointed us in
late modernity (Richards, 1989; Frosh, 1991). To be sure, the lure of so restorative a fantasy is almost irresistible, but I want to disrupt this
for two reasons: first, because psychotherapy's refuge under the mantle of scientific psychology is at the cost of deference to theories and
practices that are hostile to some of its key commitments. Second, I want to indicate both that there may be other ways of warding off the
challenge to the credibility of psychotherapeutic truths, and that psychology's claims may be far less “reliable” than they pretend.

Already I find myself using the terms that structure my topic. The literature abounds with reference to reliability, suggestibility, credibility.
While applied to children's evidence, or adult recollections of childhood in therapy, these words (like their referents) refer as much to their
contexts of use as of origin. That is, by virtue of the concern and furor they have provoked, issues of reliability, suggestibility, and credibility
concern the status of psychologists and psychotherapists no less than our (research) subjects or (therapeutic) clients. To apply the rhetoric
of current debates about child suggestibility and false memories to the contexts of production of the accounts they warrant may appear
playful, but this play is serious (as play always is). Such a move can be read in two ways: as a deconstructive move, reversing the
traditional logical-temporal progression from producer to artifact; or, more psychoanalytically, reading these terms as symptoms or traces of
a suppressed history. Either way, our gaze shifts from (therapeutic or research) outcomes to the process of production; from knowledge
claims to how these are warranted. Insofar as I can claim the credibility to do this, in this enterprise I situate myself as a critical
developmental psychologist. Such “expertise” as I can muster has been devoted to a critical scrutiny of the knowledge claims of
developmental psychology (Burman, 1994a) and its links with representations of childhood that circulate in culture (Burman, 1995a,
1997a).

Developmental Narratives
So far my story has been both general and specific. It is beyond the scope of this paper to conduct a large scale analysis of the relations
between developmental psychology and psychoanalysis—though this is clearly an important and urgent project. Some suggestive
arguments have already been put forward by Morss (1995) and Samuels (1994), with historical connections traced by Urwin (1986), and
clinical implications elaborated by Mitchell (1988). From these it is clear that the “developmental” frameworks (in the sense of successive
“stages” of development) associated with Freud, owe more to the retrospective imposition of such schemes upon his work by such
psychoanalysts and commentators as Ferenczi and Abraham than to any such unambiguous commitment on his part (although Freud did
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also contribute to this reading). That such ambiguity was present testifies to the general power and circulation of developmental theories,
including, especially, notions of progress and hierarchy within and between individuals and across groups, as well as variability in Freud's
own accounts.

Freud was writing at a time when the scientific project of reason, truth, and mastery echoed, and sometimes explicitly informed, cultural
and colonial themes that treated as a linear developmental hierarchy the qualities and achievements of men over women, Europeans over
non-Europeans, and humans over animals (Haraway, 1989). The steps from the deviant, inferior, or immature mind to the finished product
of Western civilization were reductively read onto the progression from child to adult. Child, woman, and “primitive” are thus equated in this
mode of thought, in Freud no less than other key theories of his era (such as Piaget). The particular rendering of Darwin's evolutionary
explanation that so powerfully entered social theory, that what is must be what is most functional or adaptive, privileges selection over
variability (Morss, 1990). Notwithstanding his ambiguous subscription to such ideas, central to Freud's achievement is that he attempted to
assess the costs of such adaptation, and always regarded this as compromised and partial.

There is a further legacy to which those of us in the mind and child industries are heir: Willfully or not, our focus on the individual—
combined with dominant conceptualizations that separate the individual and the social—makes it hard to connect the personal with the
contextual influences that have made the individual who she or he is. The primary focus on “the subject” repeats the Cartesian dualisms of
mind and body, and individual and social. It also allows problems to be read as individual failures. This is where developmental narratives
tie in so well with the apparatuses of regulation and surveillance associated with the “psy complex” of modern life (Rose, 1985, 1989;
Ingleby, 1985).

I should make clear that in pursuing this analysis I am not discounting the contribution of theorists such as Bruner or Vygotsky who attempt
to situate psychic life within cultural-historical practices (Vygotsky, 1982; Bruner, 1990). Nor am I underestimating the explanatory power of
developmental accounts for psychotherapeutic discussions. Nonetheless, as Morss (1995) has elaborated, even this radical current of
developmental thinking tends to be assimilated into dominant narratives of individual development that structure Anglo-U.S. psychology.
Once development is seen as individual, as having regular, discernable patterns, then the rhetorical slippage from naturalized model to
normative prescription follows imperceptibly and almost inexorably. Taking the child, or the baby, as the unit of development abstracts
subjectivity from culture, and treats human early experiences as universal constants, if not biological inevitabilities. Not only does this
provide scope for some rather worrying shifts from putative models of what development logically, conceptually involves to reading these
features as observables of early adult-child relations, thereby submitting parents, especially mothers, to evaluation. It also takes literally
what can only be a metaphorical scheme of development, reading it as a one-way track that is rediscovered, rather than invented, or
invented anew, later on—inside or outside therapy. As we shall see, this is also part of what prompts the privileging of early experience
over later relationships. In one of the earliest critical accounts of psychology's invention of childhood, Kessen traces the preoccupation with
assigning personal responsibility for development to “an amalgam of the positivistic search for causes, of the older Western tradition of
personal moral responsibility, and of the conviction that personal mastery and consequent personal responsibility are first among the goals
of child rearing” (Kessen, 1979, p. 819).

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I draw attention to these problems because they form the basis for the conceptual continuities between varieties of psychotherapeutic and
psychological explanations that I discuss later. Here I want to note how easily both psychological and psychotherapeutic varieties of
developmental explanations become enlisted into social projects of prevention and intervention. Having now outlined some general
features of the developmental narrative as it enters into psychotherapy, I now move on to outline two ways in which the recourse to the
child functions within psychological explanation. In line with the theme of juxtaposing discursive effect with process, I use psychoanalytic
terms to describe psychology, so better to highlight their disciplinary distance as well as commonality.

Family Romance/Primal Scene


The recourse to children to inform discussions of child suggestibility is structured by two related narratives of origins. To invert the
psychoanalytic inflections so often warded off in Anglo-U.S. psychology, I will call them the primal scene and the family romance
respectively. Freud discussed the primal scene as the child's (actual or phantasied) experience of parental intercourse that fractures early
narcissistic fusion with the mother and ushers in oedipal anxieties of otherness and difference. It is the key moment that shapes the
subsequent nature and form of the subject's pathologies.

Within developmental psychology what I am calling the primal scene is the fantasy that it is possible to recover or recreate the
circumstances under which the original traumatic or key moment occurred. In terms of the work on child suggestibility, this gives rise to a
vast research industry that attempts to isolate and manipulate (under ethical conditions and limits discussed later) variables considered
relevant to the misleading of children under interrogation. As I detail elsewhere (Burman, 1997b), the psychological research on child
suggestibility is not only a response to pressing social issues, but is justified in terms of the opportunities to elaborate general models of
memory (Lindsay and Read, 1994; Ceci and Bruck, 1993). So once again we see the shift from the study of the specific child to the
formulation of general frameworks; from individual accounting processes in particular arenas and at particular moments to the production
of the decontextualized abstract thinker; the epistemic subject of Piaget's model, and characteristic of Western psychology (Henriques,
Hollway, Venn, Urwin, and Walkerdine, 1984). Once again, children's interrogations in court are positioned as the limiting case, the deviant
(in relation both to conversational practices and normalized childhoods), accessible population that allows psychology to benefit by
scrutiny.

The second variety of developmental narrative reproduced within the child suggestibility research is that of the family romance. Here the
child becomes the naturalized subject, whose study indicates the normal, inevitable developmental progressions that we all supposedly
share. Thus tales of infantile amnesia figure frequently within research reports on children's suggestibility, which, in some cases, are then
linked to the (lack of) likelihood of recovery of authentic early memories. Not only do we see here exhibited the standard narrative of
treating children as methodological devices by which to understand adults, thus reading adult claims about the past in terms of normative
descriptions of children. More than this, the work on childhood suggestibility follows a variant of the developmental fallacy that the earlier
something is found the more enduring and closer to nature (or biology) it must be (Lieven, 1981; Henshall and McGuire, 1986). As Mitchell
(1988) comments in relation to psychoanalysis:

    The development tilt has generated what at times seems to be an infinite regress in claims to developmental priority. A psychodynamic
account which each author regards as more basic, more primary, than structural conflict, is presented as earlier.… “Deeper” is translated

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into “earlier,” rather than into “more fundamental,” as if dynamics attributable to the first months of life or to prenatal existence still occupy
the most basic layers of experience, underlying and governing psychic events and processes of later chronological origin. This mode of
introducing theoretical innovations strains credulity; it also skews these innovations in a peculiar way, by collapsing relational issues into
the interaction between mother and infant during the earliest months of life [p. 140]. rather than into “more fundamental,” as if dynamics
attributable to the first months of life or to prenatal existence still occupy the most basic layers of experience, underlying and governing
psychic events and processes of later chronological origin. This mode of introducing theoretical innovations strains credulity; it also skews
these innovations in a peculiar way, by collapsing relational issues into the interaction between mother and infant during the earliest
months of life [p. 140].

Applying this to the work on child suggestibility, if children are shown to be unreliable reporters about events that happened a few weeks
before (Poole and White, 1993; Loftus, 1993), so, it is implied, how much more unreliable must be claims of recollections of childhood in
adulthood.

The Child Within


So far I have commented on the rhetorical functions of children in psychological stories. However, similar tropes attend the recourse to the
child in psychotherapeutic discourse. What we see exhibited in the literature claiming to assess “the reality of repressed memories” (Loftus,
1993) is the combined effect of another kind of elision: between what and how children remember and/or report, and what adults remember
of their childhoods—inside or outside therapeutic contexts. What both psychological and therapeutic accounts share, and what the claims
of relevance for psychological evidence rely upon, is, paradoxically, an essentializing and abstraction of those very categories of childhood
and memory whose constructed basis they claim to demonstrate.

The tendency in both popular and therapeutic accounts to treat the child evoked in therapy as some literal equivalent of the child the adult
was, conflates psychoanalytic notions of regression, fixation, deferred action, and transference. It is, of course, significant that the
therapeutic practices at issue in the discussion around memory recovery (such as hypnotherapy, psychokinesis, etc.) would (quite possibly
and in some circumstances definitely) not subscribe to this psychoanalytic framework, despite being informed by psychoanalytic notions of
unconscious psychic processes and repression. This is also what underlies the alliance of psychology and psychoanalysis in denouncing
such practices (though, as I later suggest, this may belie other interests).

What is crucial to the distinction between adult recollection in therapy and childhood reports is not only an issue of memory for mundane
vs. traumatic events, or the impact of affective state at the moment of encoding memories (Pillemer and White, 1989; Lindsay and Read,
1994), which have preoccupied the developmental research and the claims to psychotherapeutic relevance of this work. It is the
misreading of the psychoanalytic notion of “deferred action” or nachträglichkeit, that is, how experiences, impressions, and memory traces
may be revised at a later date to fit in with fresh experiences or with the attainment of a new stage of development(Laplanche and Pontalis,
1973). This notion was central to Freud's account of psychic causality and temporality, and its significance is that it “rule[s] out the
summary interpretation which reduces the psycho-analytic view of the subject to a linear determinism envisaging nothing but the action of
the past upon the present” (pp. 111-112). Rather, certain conditions in the present, inside or outside particular therapeutic or professional
relationships, allow for previously unconscious thoughts to become articulable, and thus the patient understands their

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unconsciousrepetition. In this sense it “takes two traumas to make a trauma” (Laplanche, 1989): The earlier one is rediscovered only
through its later evocation.

This does not, however, mean that the content or form of the account in the present bears any necessary or absolute identity with the
events that instigated it; on this psychoanalytic and cognitive psychological accounts (for different reasons) agree (e.g., Cohler, 1994;
Fonagy, 1994). What is not disputed is that something happened, but exactly what is not considered directly recoverable (and in some
psychoanalytic frameworks not considered relevant—here the clash of legal and psychoanalytic truths become clear). Transference
rekindles “infantile imagos” (Freud, 1912, p. 102), but in no absolute or isomorphic relation with their “original.” While Bradley (1991)
argues for the allegorical status of the baby in psychological research, Mitchell (1988) elaborates on the metaphor of the baby in therapy:

    In employing infantilism as a basis for interpretation, we are using our image of the baby as a metaphor. The analysand is not literally a
baby, but we think of him in those terms, as wishing, fearing, and experiencing like a baby—we find meaning and patterns in otherwise
inchoate fragments of experience [p. 128].

Further, Piontelli (1992) in her empirical analyses of continuities between pre- and postnatal life, reports in the postscript to her research
how, by age 4 or 5, the children's conceptions of their prenatal experience became infused with phantasies and associations “quite remote
from the original ‘facts’ as they were observed by me and recollected and worked through by these children even just a few months before
these later observations” (p. 244).

Thus the idea that in therapy the client or patient accesses “the child within” takes what is a metaphor for unmet needs and desires and
reads it as a literal return to an earlier biographical position. While such a reading is possible within the psychoanalytic notion of regression,
Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) highlight the logical and spatial, as well as temporal readings of regression. So Freud's distinction between
topological, formal, and temporal regression reminds us of two issues: First, that these forms do not always coincide, “It is true that in
hysteria there is a regression of the libido to the primary incestuous sexual objects and that this occurs quite regularly; but there is as good
as no regression to an earlier stage of sexual organization” (Freud, 1916-1917, p. 343). This therefore would caution against a restricted
temporal or developmental reading of regression.

Second, given this, regression can only be descriptive, “not enough to tell us in what manner the subject is returning to the past”
(Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973, p. 386). This is what allows for the different understandings of the psychoanalytic models of developmental
arrest and drive repetition. Moreover, even this notion of temporal regression is not singular, since “Freud distinguishes, according to
different lines of development, between a regression as regards the object, a regression as regards the libidinal stage and a regression in
the evolution of the ego” (p. 387). Thus regression in the transference (a precondition for claims that adult clients are returning to a
childhood state) may be only one variety of regression, which is to be distinguished from both more literal comparisons that circulate in
popular and therapeutic explanations, such as returning to earlier chronological periods of life (regression of the schizophrenic to the state
of a baby), or logical returns to earlier forms of psychic organization (e.g., regression to “the anal stage”). Similarly, Mitchell highlights how
Freud considered that causation of symptoms could only be understood retrospectively:

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    Certain kinds of issues (such as fusion and separation, love and hate, dependence and independence) are basic to human experience
throughout the lifespan. Thus the developmental reasoner—whether drive theorist or developmental-arrest theorist—can always find
infantile experiences which are similar or structurally parallel to adult issues. What makes genetic construction so compelling (and so
dangerous) is the ease with which one can attribute causation to structural parallels, can claim that the earlier phenomenon somehow
underlies or causes the later one [1988, pp. 145-146].

The problem with the appeal to a childlike psychic structure, is that it fuses together these three distinct senses. Even Alice Miller, whose
work has been so influential in highlighting the prevalence of abuse, including sexual abuse, of children (Miller, 1985, 1991), and in
recovering the “injured child within the adult” (Miller, 1991), in a recent interview spoke of being led by her “inner child.” As her interviewer
commented:

        But that delicate concept of the child within has been battered out of shape by the crazy growth in US-therapies where endless
dependence, endless appeals to the “inner child” have taken over. Her responsible arguments about our need to respect real children have
been twisted by cults and quacks who don't want to let the children grow up    

    [Walter, 1995, p. 43].

Scott (1997) has recently offered a more psychoanalytically inclined critique of her work.

We need to counter a reductionistic developmentalism that warrants interpretation of the here-and-now as isomorphic to what went before.
According to some current accounts, the past in therapy is continually undergoing transformation, “from debris into meaningful presence”
(Bollas, 1995, p. 144). Moreover, it is as much under destruction as construction: “for the unconscious work has a dismantling effect, as
historical texts of reconstruction give birth to other ideas and contrary reflective theories, which destroy the placid aim of creating
commemorative plaques to one's new discoveries” (p. 145).

While psychoanalysis works backwards, its juxtaposition with developmental psychology invites a prospective reading. In Freud's words:
“the mirror image of the present is seen in a fantasied past, which then prophetically becomes the present” (Freud and Fleiss, 1887-1904,
p. 320).

What makes such conceptual confusions possible is the common focus on the child. Historical and anthropological work indicates that
meanings of childhood are culturally and historically specific. Further, ideas about childrearing and schooling are intimately associated with
social preoccupations and changes (Newson and Newson, 1973; Hendrick, 1990). It is this inevitable that the inner child of new age
discourses and the child within certain psychotherapies is a repository of profoundly ideological assumptions about childhood. Moreover,
part of the cultural baggage about childhood prompts these ideas about children's natures and abilities to be abstracted from the cultural-
political contexts that produced them.

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This mystification is no less evident in experimental psychology's treatment of the child as variable, of the claims to distinguish affect and
cognition (e.g., Harris, 1987; Bradley, 1991), and of what I have called the primal scene and the family romance. Both parties are therefore
vulnerable to the same conceptual dangers of naturalizing and essentializing the core constructs at issue through abstracting them from
the context of their production. In the case of some (nonpsychoanalytic) therapies this tends to prompt a spurious humanist commitment to
belief in all features of an account, with any suspicion considered tantamount to undermining personhood. Paradoxically, although
psychology lays claim to rational evaluation of accounts through analysis of the contextual sensitivity of memorial, including children's
reports, the discipline thereby fails to attend to the theoretical-metaphysical load children carry in its own accounts shared by both
psychology and the therapies it is used to critique is a subscription to a notion of self, epitomized by the metaphorical child, as immanent,
authentic, integrated, and good (Henriques et al., 1984; Burman, 1994b; Steedman, 1995).

The equation between the mainly female therapy clients claiming to recall abuse in childhood and the children whose accounts are
investigated in child suggestibility experiments implies an infantilization of women and a feminization of the children studied that reiterates
broader and long-standing themes (Burman, 1995b). Insofar as feminist therapies have also drawn upon the figure of the child as
metaphor for the good, authentic, inner—or needy—self (Eichenbaum and Orbach, 1982), they run the risk of conflating possibility,
plausibility, and credibility with authenticity. This is an issue currently addressed in debates about feminist methodology (Maynard and
Purvis, 1994), as well as in feminist analyses of women's accounts of sexual assault (Forress Bennett, 1997) and of feminist
psychotherapy(Burman, 1995b). These accounts address how the linguistic resources of varieties of self-reference allow for disjunctions
between, as well as continuities of, identity. Just as the truth of a person's life is not singular but may shift according to their narrative
frameworks within and outside therapy, so the truths of research, including psychological research, may also be narratives, albeit ones
bestowed with privileged knowledge-bearing status. If this is so, they should be framed with correspondingly modest claims.

Clinical Work vs. Observation


These debates reiterate a more long-standing set of tensions between psychology and psychoanalysis. While notions of an “inner child”
form part of contemporary modern subjectivity, including new age discourses and therapies such that, for example, transactional analysis
offers a tripartite structure of the self in terms of the ego states of parent, adult and child, some more psychoanalytic frameworks may also
fall foul of these elisions. Notwithstanding the focus on phantasy, and efforts to maintain the distinctiveness of different interpretive
frameworks, current approaches sometimes tend to take the logical framework of psychic organization and development as equivalent to a
developmental account. This movement characterizes various of the relational schools of psychoanalysis. The North American
psychoanalyst and psychologist Daniel Stern's work (Stern, 1985) is currently attracting attention, particularly in relation to his calls for
psychotherapists to engage with, and make their models compatible with, developmental psychological research. Mitchell (1988, p. 137)
also suggests that one motive for the popularity of empirical developmental psychology lies in how it offers a way of challenging classical,
especially drive, concepts in psychoanalysis without evoking fears of disloyalty or revisionism.

Stern draws the important overall distinction between the different projects and corresponding claims of therapy and research; between the
“clinical infant” and the “observed infant.” Psychotherapy (he says) is about arriving at a narrative of the client's biographical history, while
developmental psychology (in its current dominant practice) is concerned with observing infant and child behaviors. “Psychoanalysts are
developmental theorists working backwards in time. Their primary aim was to aid in understanding the development of psychopathology. In
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contrast the approach taken here is normative rather than pathomorphic, and prospective rather than retrospective” (Stern, 1985, pp. 19-
20).

The crucial point is that it is not possible from developmental observation to make anything other than normative descriptions, either of how
one particular adult-child dyad compares with others, or with the same pair at a different temporal moment. Two problems occur in rearing
this work psychotherapeutically; first, inevitably, the therapist approaches developmental research through the framework of a therapeutic
narrative about development, which therefore encourages her or him to interpret the empirical work accordingly; but, second, the
distinctions between the normative and prospective project of developmental psychology and the pathomorphic and retrospective project of
psychotherapy are not as clear as such differences in terms would suggest. This is because, both conceptually and historically, the projects
of normalization and identification of pathology coincide, from the very earliest child studies that marked the beginnings of “individual
psychology” and that formed the context for the birth of psychoanalysis (Riley, 1983; Rose, 1985, 1989).

The goals of identification and prediction of future pathology that lie at the heart of the project of normative developmental descriptions
import social and therapeutic narratives about ability and adjustment. However, owing to their status as scientific, objective practices, these
presuppositions are couched in terms of incontestable or implicit truths. Thus parents and children under psychological observation are in
danger of being subject to a pathologizing gaze that works in two directions simultaneously—normatively and retrospectively. But just as a
retrospective account can organize the earlier events in accordance with later outcomes (as in nachträglichkeit), so the prospective,
normative one can devalue the role of later precipitating events as prompting pathology. Either way, we arrive at the familiar situation
where, as within current social arrangements, parents, especially mothers become responsible for multiple social agendas and moral
panics about (for example) children, discipline, and authoritarianism.

All these arguments are familiar (see also Mitchell [1988] on therapy; Bradley [1991] on psychology), but the key points I want to
emphasize are: first, that the objectivity and scientific status of developmental psychology belie profound moral-political commitments that
deeply inscribe that discipline; and second, such assumptions assume incontestable and naturalized truth-status by virtue of the inability of
science-seeking practices to acknowledge the partiality of their claims. Psychotherapists seeking the “clinical” infant or child within the
“observed” one are therefore in danger not only of conflating two distinct levels of interpretation, but also of thereby further fixing these
together by their scrutiny of real children and their parents.

Condensation and Splitting


In addition to the current psychotherapeutic interest in developmental perspectives, one of the striking features of the public debate around
the constructive basis of memory is the apparent alliance between cognitive psychology and psychoanalysis. Both converge to cast doubt
on the likelihood of memory recovery, but on closer inspection this commonality of current claims can be seen to belie a history of conflict
and incompatible premises (at least in Anglo-U.S. contexts). Although some public responses have treated the debate around false
memories as an opportunity to undermine psychoanalysis(Pope and Hudson, 1994), in general psychoanalytic claims about the joint
production of meaning in therapy are presented in the research literature as compatible with those of cognitive science, and draw upon
research with children as well we neurological accounts. While this could well be interpreted as indicating psychoanalysts' desires to take
cover under the mantle of science, the dynamic of defense and deference is not only one way. Morton (1994) offers his Headed Records

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model of memory as accounting for the phenomena of dissociation often reported as associated with traumatic experiences, while in the
same journal, Cohler (1994) emphasizes how psychoanalysis concerns the current context of the relationship in which the account is
elicited, rather than the contents of the account.

This convergence represents a significant revision of longstanding key conceptual rifts between psychoanalytic and psychological forms of
explanation. Concern with providing a psychological explanation for the possibility of unconscious memories is not the same as indicating
anything of the motives for its repression or the structure of the psychic apparatus involved. In particular this apparent similarity confounds
key psychoanalytic distinctions between economic, topological, and dynamic views of repression. Laplanche and Pontalis specifically point
out that Freud's account of the constitution of memory traces is “quite distinct from the empiricist notion of the engram, defined as an
impression bearing a resemblance to the corresponding reality” (1973, p. 248). Moreover the conception of deferred action central to
psychoanalytic claims of trauma, or material that cannot be meaningfully incorporated, nevertheless, “cannot be understood in terms of
variable time-lapses, due to some kind of storing procedure, between stimulus and response” (p. 114).

Peter Fonagy, British psychoanalyst and advisor to the British False MemorySociety, recently discussed the relevance of cognitive science
and neurological research as well as studies of children in his (1994) account of memorial reconstruction in psychoanalysis. He considered
that “children are vulnerable [to being suggestible] probably because the frontal lobes are the part of the brain latest to mature” (p. 6).
However, he stopped short of applying this in a reductionist way to the psychoanalytic consulting room. Instead, he offered a constructionist
account of the relevance of this corpus of scientific data, arguing that because this research will inform the “folk psychology” of memory
that patients bring to their psychoanalytic encounters it will inevitably enter into its practice (p. 7).

Thus similarity of sources, or uncanny harmonization of claims, belie key differences in framework and history. One way of reading this
alliance is as a form of splitting. Like the distressed child who “forgets” a traumatic experience, psychoanalytic accounts ward off the threat
to their credibility by distancing themselves from the vilified practices (of pop psychology, self-help, cued memory recall, hypnotherapy,
psychokinesis, etc., as discussed by Lindsay and Read [1994]). Such appeals to social credibility should be noted, even while
acknowledging that psychoanalytic approaches do depart in crucial ways from the therapies at issue in the false memory debates. In
particular; what is achieved by this distancing from the fundamentalist therapies' fixed view of the past, with their corresponding nuances of
totalitarianism, dogmatism, and authoritarianism, is the partaking of the socially valued opposite in that binary-liberal democracy (Burman,
1997a).

That transference and suggestibility are inevitably linked is a matter Freud himself was only too willing to acknowledge (Freud, 1912,
1937). Indeed in his later work he regarded the process of interpretation as more properly termed construction, but argued that its
suggested or constructed status would only become incorporated into the patients' convictions if it genuinely recovered a fragment of lost
experience. “His [the analyst's] task is to make out what has been forgotten from the traces it has left behind or, more correctly, to construct
it” (Freud, 1937, p. 259).

Notwithstanding his analyses of the ways and reasons why patients may acquiesce to (and resist) suggestions, and the fact that he may
well have underestimated the extent to which he himself imposed interpretations, Freud was at least very clear that the analyst's work was

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to make—good or bad—constructions. Transference issues make power relations of coercion central to psychoanalysis (unlike some other
therapies). By according them this key role as a topic in the therapy, this makes constructions and their process of formulation overt and
thus more contestable, and as such could be said to ward off some of the more coercive tendencies.

A second variety of this splitting is between science and society. The psychological literature distinguishes carefully between research on
children's suggestibility and claims about the implantation of false memories of abuse recalled by adults. Rather, it is the popular media and
moral panics that are held responsible for their conflation. However, this fails to acknowledge psychology's role in producing these
discursive conditions. The vilification of pop psychology secures the integrity of “real” psychology. That this is a false distinction is
evidenced by the success with which psychology informs pop as well as professional (medical, welfare) practice (Newnes, 1994). While we
see psychological practices engaging in the (partial and motivated) rescue narrative of science, psychoanalysis partakes in this only at the
cost of scientizing therapy. In so doing it may also accord psychological research more explanatory weight and ethical credibility than it
warrants. For the final section of this paper, I move now to discuss the conditions in which the psychological research on child suggestibility
is carried out.

Are We All “Honest Liars”?


Are we honest? (Why) do we lie? What do we know? How do we know (that we know what we know)? And who are “we”? These deeply
moral-political concerns that form the explicit topic of the child suggestibility research are quintessential philosophical questions of the
enlightenment project of modernity, reason, and social progress. In staking its claim to this through experimental studies, psychology
clarifies its current insertion within, as well as potential for commentary on, legal-juridical categories of truth and responsibility. While
psychologists and lawyers ponder on whether we say what we know, therapists explore whether we know what we say. At the same time,
the threat to the truth of childhood innocence and family security mobilized by (false and true) claims of child sexual abuse—in children and
as recollected in adulthood—maps onto a broader crisis over truth, certainty and “the good society.” It is in this context that psychology
assumes its own truth-telling role.

The developmental story of memory takes memorial fallibility as an inevitable and intrinsic feature of the human condition. The “honest
liars” account is one that appears in many articles, including a summary of such research published in the second British False
MemorySociety Newsletter (Tyrell, 1994). Empirical psychological researchers are torn between narratives of social relevance, and of
acknowledgment of the limited ecological validity of the work they perform. Alongside the routine claims that “The study of children's
memories about abusive actions provides one window into the corner of children's minds. Through this window we may gain important
insights both for psychology and for justice” (Goodman, Rudy, Bottoms, and Aman, 1990, p. 280), are, in this case in the same account,
acknowledgment of a variety of conditions that limit according to these studies more than the status of a glimpse through this “window.”
These include: primarily exploring memory for single events only; with unfamiliar adults; conducting fewer interviews than would actual
court case investigations; not implying that consequences of children's accounts might be that they are taken away from home; not posing
as legal authorities or implying that the confederate researchers were criminals; not engaging in direct or indirect cross-examination (as in
courtrooms); not instilling in children a reason to lie in order to protect a loved one (Goodman et al., 1990, p. 280). (Reading this list, one is
tempted to treat this as grounds for relief rather than methodological complaint.) Whilst acknowledging, as Ceci and Bruck [1993] do,

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therefore, that the psychological study of children's suggestibility bears but a pale metaphorical relation to actual investigatory and
courtroom practice—thankfully—the question remains of whether it could, or should, do more than this.

Surely we should reflect on what positions of identification psychological researchers are assuming when they set out to model contexts of
abuse investigations. One study reports training research assistants to measure children's distress (considered relevant to the form and
quality of event encoding) by having them watch and rate videos of children being anaesthetized (Bruck, Ceci, Francoeur, and Barr, 1995).
Others take as variables for manipulation misleading “abuse” questions, which include suggesting that they have been kissed, undressed,
or spanked during a medical procedure (Goodman and Aman, 1990), or suggesting that they have been genitally touched during a
standardized medical checkup (Saywitz, Goodman, Nicholas, and Moan, 1991). Given the limitations on what can be said from these
studies, and the drift toward claiming that children's beliefs are influenced by such suggestions and remain so after “debriefing,” should we
not only also be considering the productive effects (for psychologists and for children) of engaging in these practices of accounts of eliciting
abuse? More than this, in simulating these procedures of “methodologically sound” (Goodman and Aman, 1990) manufacturing of consent,
this gives the impression that experimental truth-telling practices are transparent or innocent.

Fonagy (1994), in his account of Piaget's celebrated constructed memory tale, draws the moral that only external evidence can distinguish
wish-fulfilling fantasy from childhoodtrauma. However true this may be, the problem is that the criteria for what counts as “external
evidence” are far less clear than this formulation would suggest.

In this article I have discussed psychotherapy's enlistment of psychology in warding off the challenge to its professional credibility and
expertise posed by the debates about “false memories.” In evaluating this I have explored psychology's metaphorical recourse to, and
dependence on, particular representations of children in articulating the more general mode of developmental narrative of modernity,
science, and progress, with its corresponding subjectivity of individual interiority. In particular, I have highlighted the naturalizing impetus of
normalizing developmental models. Perhaps the tensions between this developmental, scientific narrative and the need to demonstrate the
competence and utility of psychologists make the search for “sound” as well as “relevant” research a more conceptually difficult enterprise
than these studies sometimes imply. However, this is not always a choice. At the very least what is needed is not only the “more research
needs to be done” expansionist and specular narrative of “opening the window” and moving from the “cornered” periphery to the center of
children's minds. In researching and interpreting influences on children's views—whether as psychologists, as therapists, or as
commentators—it is surely relevant to consider the influences shaping our views of children's minds. As Kessen (1979) concludes:

    [T]he transformations of the past 100 years in both children and child psychology are a startling reminder of the eternal call on us to be
scrupulous observers and imaginative researchers; they may also serve to force our self-critical recognition that we are both creators and
performers in the cultural invention of the child [p. 820].

Such self-critical reflection concerns not merely whether or not we talk of corners or of other topologies and temporalities, but also how we
consider psychology's and psychotherapy's historical and current relation to matters of justice and inequality.

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