THE RECONSTRUCTION OF A REPRESSED SEXUAL MOLESTATION 50 YEARS LATER

The current public concern about childhood molestation and abuse has f ueled the debate in psychoanalysis about historical versus narrative t ruth, a subject that has implicitly and explicitly been an important t heme since the origin of psychoanalysis. The evocation of false memori es by suggestion has had significant social consequences. This raises important questions about the role of real trauma as contrasted with f antasy in the genesis of psychic conflict. This paper explores the con ditions for the emergence of long repressed trauma. It is argued that such traumatic memories emerge only after significant structural chang e has occurred, in particular modifications in the representational wo rld (self and object representations). This substantive change may be viewed as a macroscopic way station in the evolution of the analysis. This is demonstrated in the description of the analysis of a patient b orn with a congenital anomaly. The analysis of her unconscious fantasi es about her deformity, her identifications with defective people, and of a negative paternal transference had to occur before the developme nt of an erotic transference. It was then that fragments of the memory of the sexual trauma emerged. Details of the reconstruction are prese nted. The successful integration of this painful experience is describ ed. Six years after termination of the analysis, the patient wrote a l etter describing a confirmation of the event, now sixty years past, fr om the sole other survivor of the period who had knowledge of what had happened.