IPT Book Reviews

Title: Construction and Reconstruction of Memory: Dilemmas of Child Sexual Abuse
Editor: Charlotte Prozan
Publisher: Jason Aronson, Inc. ©1997

Jason Aronson, Inc.
230 Livingston Street
Northvale, NJ 07647
(800) 782-0015
$27.50 (c)

This 236-page book was edited by a social worker who is an Associate Director of the San Francisco Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He has collected a large number of authors and articles, but the book is primarily psychoanalytic in its approach.

Parts one and two address theoretical issues and legal issues, including the Ramona case. Part three, the longest, deals with clinical issues. In Chapter 10, the author, using "clues" and 18 years of treatment, uncovers a delayed memory. The political nature of the repressed memory debate is discussed in Chapter 13 and Chapter 9 describes the development of a memory that is identified as false. References follow each chapter and the book closes with a short index.

The book inadequately addresses the current controversies regarding the historical accuracy of delayed memory of trauma, and its psychoanalytic orientation limits its usefulness. As Dr. Elizabeth Loftus states in a dust jacket blurb, there is "much to disagree with."

Reviewed by LeRoy G. Schultz, Emeritus Professor, West Virginia University.

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