ESTABLISHING TRAUMA - THE DIFFICULTY DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN MEMORIES AND FANTASIES

This paper is intended as a contribution to understanding why, up unti l recently, there have been so few case reports of actual abuse and it s sequelae in the psychoanalytic literature. We suggest that psychoana lytic insights into the nature of psychic reality, while indispensable to the evolution of psychoanalytic thinking, have nonetheless had the adverse effect of collapsing any distinction between unconscious fant asies and repressed memories. Moreover, the idea that knowledge of ext ernal reality is itself mentally constructed also has diminished inter est in uncovering trauma and ''real'' history. We present a report of an adult analysis that illustrates the recovery of a dissociated memor y of sexual abuse that occurred during adolescence, as a springboard t o discuss problems analysts have had in dealing with trauma theoretica lly. We hypothesize that repressed memories and conscious fantasies ca n often be distinguished insofar as they may be ''stored'' or encoded differently, and that consequently the sequelae of trauma and fantasy often, but not always, can be disentangled. We describe some different modes of encoding trauma and some different ways of remembering, reex periencing, and reenacting it. And, finally, we suggest why traumatic memories are increasingly accessible to patients today.