Sir, - John Waters (Opinion, August 7th) rightly denounces self-accrediting counsellors, therapists and the like. He is not alone in bringing to the attention of the public the damage done by fraudulent therapists and their (generally) unfounded elicitation of sexual abuse.
Mr Waters is, however, fundamentally wrong in accusing Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis in particular of being the perpetrator of such irresponsible and manipulative behaviour. Psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists would see recovered memory therapists per se as charlatans, using reputable freudian terms as a cover for the creation of false memories in their emotionally vulnerable and suggestible clients. Analysts of most theoretical persuasions would take the view that memory is a combination of fact and fantasy, re-arranged as a narrative according to the current emotional status of the "client" and influenced by their affective relationship to the therapist.
Despite Mr Waters's emotional description of Sigmund Freud as "a drug-addled, sewer-minded crackpot", he nevertheless used Freud's perceptive understanding of repressed memories and sublimated desire to great effect in his own book An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Ireland (Duckworth 1998). In this provocative book, he declares that "the guilt, pain, anger, fear an self-hatred which deeply infect society in the Republic provides the motivation [for] revisionists seeking to explain away their own pained experience". . .because. . . "somewhere inside all Irish bodies is the pain of our [collective] history" [p.89]. It would appear, therefore, that without Freud's "ragbag of gobbledygook", John Waters's own perceptive understanding of Irish history would be incomplete, lacking in depth and indeed, unable to tackle a traumatised past. - Yours, etc.,
Robert Vance, St David's Terrace, Dublin 9.