>As for the nature of your main objection, my contention wasn't that
>most therapists who created and propagated the idea of recovering
>repressed memory of child abuse were Freudian, though, as Freud put
>it, "The theory of repression is the corner-stone on which the whole
>structure of psycho-analysis rests." I don't know if the original
>proponents were Freudian psychoanalysts or other schools of
>psychoanalysts, but eventually the belief in the recovered memory
>spread very widely within the therapeutic profession:
Freudian psychoanalysis was founded on skepticism about literal memories of incest, much to the annoyance of Jeff Masson and some anti-Freudian feminists. Juliet Mitchell has an essay somewhere arguing that what's important about Freudian models of the psyche is the role of fantasy and defense mechanisms - that psychoanalysis is not about biography. It seems that many of these "recovered" memories are encouraged by specialists - and memory is very unreliable and suggestible. It seems outrageous to base legal cases on recovered memory.
Doug