In September 2025, the New York Times published an article about Amy Griffin’s memoir. After a discussion with her daughter (10), who criticized her mother’s need to appear perfect, Ms. Griffin (49) decided to take an illegal psychedelic-drug therapy (MDMA) – a mix of Molly and Ecstasy. During sessions, she remembered being sexually assaulted multiple times by her schoolteacher. She depicts these assaults “as violent and brazen”.[1] Her memoir gained media popularity, and she became an icon of the #MeToo movement. But when the detective of her hometown opened a case to interview other victims of this teacher, nobody testified… In his experience with sexual abuse victims, the detective learned that sexual predators usually have several victims, and when one testifies, many others support the claim. So, what happened in this case?
Ms. Griffin wrote about one classmate, Claudia, to whom she lent a dress for a teen’s ball. “In my memory, the dress and Claudia and Mr. Manson [the teacher] were all linked in some mysterious way I couldn’t explain”.[2] This recollection reminded me of Lol V. Stein, and how Tatiana’s appearance pictured a scene in which an apparition, embodied by a dress, transported the protagonist to a ball, where she lost the man of her life[3]. Her fantasy is sustained by a dress, a dress that wraps the other woman’s body and that transports her to a scene, where she could not find words to describe her ravage.[4]
Ms. Griffin and Claudia met. Claudia denied being abused by their teacher.
An advocate for MDMA therapy supported the idea that the veracity of memories is not important, that they are “symbolic”[5] and help the patient to fill a void. This idea of them being “symbolic” seemed to be a maneuver to disguise a hole in the symbolic, since patients are not invited to process memories. The proliferation of meaning, a memoir of sexual abuse, was produced without mediation, directly through the arousal of a mortifying jouissance that she could not take accountability for. She searched for an unbearable “truth” in the imaginary to explain why her daughter had questioned her need for perfection.
By contrast, in psychoanalysis, the metaphoric and metonymic production of meaning proliferates until the love for one’s unconscious comes into play. Then, the role of the analyst’s interpretations, as jaculation, is “to make a hole in discourse” [6], emptying meaning. In the beginning, there are links between S1s and S2s as truths, then the position of the analyst in “reserve of the truth” [7] , allows an analysand to face his void. Through psychoanalyst’s cuts, interpretations and act, a different kind of truth arises that might come from body events, from the link between jouissance and object a, possibly knotting the three registers (RSI).
Statements of victims of abuse in the U. S. are not read in a logic of case by case; they are taken as one plus one. Each subject adds his surplus abuse to the series.[8] What needed to be processed in a setting in which subjects can come to listen to themselves, promoting a savoir-y-faire with their traumas and jouissances, instead becomes a one for all and all for one voice that alienates subjects from their troumatismes.[9]
- Rosman, K., Egan, E., “The Billionaire, the Psychedelics and the Best-Selling Memoir,” September 24, 2020, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/nyregion/amy-griffin-memoir-psychedelic-drugs.html ↑
- Ibid. ↑
- Duras, M., The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein. New York : Pantheon, 1986). ↑
- Lacan, J. “Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras.” Autre Écrits. Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2001. ↑
- Op. Cit. ↑
- Laurent, E., “Interpretation: From Truth to Event”, The Lacanian Review 8, December 2019 p. 119. ↑
- Ibid. ↑
- Alberti, C., “Sexuality since Lacan”, September 11, 2025, Mondō, On-line Dispatch of WAP, https://mondodispatch.com/en/2025/09/11/sexuality-since-lacan/ ↑
- Troumatisme: The term troumatisme is used by Lacan in lesson eight of Seminar XXI to describe trauma as a ‘hole in the Real’. ↑
