Healing Sylvia: Accounting for the Textual `Discovery' of Unconscious Knowledge

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Abstract
This article consists of an examination of some aspects of a `memoir of incest and of healing', which documents the `discovery', through the uncovering of `unconscious' events, of the authors knowledge that she was sexually abused as a child. Reviewers and researchers have used this text, and other first person accounts, as representative of the `reality' of sexual abuse and the `truthfulness' and `honesty' of the author. Alternatively, I do not consider the representative capacity of the memoir, but rather focus on the constitutive properties of the text, to explicate how `truth' and `reality' are produced. Emphasis is laid upon the procedures used to make subjectivity objective through an analysis of the text's appropriation of tacit linguistic and cultural resources. This is not simply an analytic matter as, in practical terms, it reins highly consequential for the negotiation of guilt, blame and responsibility. This approach towards the sociological use of autobiography is analytically highly productive.

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