Abstract
The debate over repressed memories of sexual abuse has been conducted in the popular press and the public imagination as well as in the professional literature of feminist psychotherapy, contemporary psychoanalysis and cognitive science. At issue are prescriptive questions concerning the status of recollection, subjectivity, and ''the real'' in clinical and public life. Such questions are also at the center of interdisciplinary inquiry and reflect the postmodern theorizing in contemporary intellectual work. This paper will evaluate some of the conceptual issues at stake in this controversy. It is argued that consideration of the controversy itself, in addition to the problems to which it refers, has important implications for the clinical professions as well as for survivors of abuse. The apparent assessment of memory at the center of this debate is also being used to generate an evaluation of clinical work itself, and reflects efforts to justify regulating and limiting the scope of clinical practice.
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