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McNally, Richard J Remembering Trauma
McNally, Richard J
Remembering Trauma
Review of "Remembering Trauma" by Frederick Crews
http://search.barnesandnoble.com
From the Publisher
Are horrific experiences indelibly fixed in a victim's memory? Or does
the mind protect itself by banishing traumatic memories from consciousness? How
victims remember trauma is the most controversial issue in psychology today,
spilling out of consulting rooms and laboratories to capture headlines, rupture
families, provoke legislative change, and influence criminal trials and civil
suits. This book, by a clinician who is also a laboratory researcher, is the
first comprehensive, balanced analysis of the clinical and scientific evidence
bearing on this issue--and the first to provide definitive answers to the
urgent questions at the heart of the controversy.
Synthesizing clinical case reports and the vast research literature on the
effects of stress, suggestion, and trauma on memory, Richard McNally arrives at
significant conclusions, first and foremost that traumatic experiences are
indeed unforgettable. Though people sometimes do not think about disturbing
experiences for long periods of time, traumatic events rarely slip from
awareness for very long; furthermore, McNally reminds us, failure to think
about traumas--such as early sexual abuse--must not be confused with amnesia or
an inability to remember them. In fact, the evidence for repressed memories of
trauma--or even for repression at all--is surprisingly weak.
A magisterial work of scholarship, panoramic in scope and nonpartisan
throughout, this unfailingly lucid work will prove indispensable to anyone
seeking to understand how people remember trauma.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com
The
Debbie Nathan
Richard McNally calls this theory of amnesia "psychiatric
folklore." As a therapist and a professor of psychology at Harvard, he has
spent years studying the effects of trauma on people's mental processes --
including memory. He is on top of the research and has done some of it himself.
The investigational literature is vast, and Remembering Trauma covers virtually
all of it (the Works Cited section lists some 1,400 journal articles). With so
many academics and statistics weighing in, this could be a murky book,
interesting only to psychology-minded professionals. Instead, it is
plain-speaking, elegant and impassioned. It makes a supposedly complex topic
simple. Or at least simple enough to make readers wonder about the ready
acceptance of a notion that goes against common sense and experience. —
www.amazon.com
From the New
England Journal of Medicine, November 6, 2003
Robert J. Ursano, M.D.
Books with nearly 100
pages of references, not to mention notes, are treasures as resources, even if
their content and the discussion they contain require much work of the reader.
Remembering Trauma is such a book. It is not, however, about remembering
trauma. Rather, it is about the debate over the recall of childhood sexual
trauma. It also is not without a point of view of its own. McNally begins with
a useful and dramatic history of the debate about the recall of childhood
sexual abuse. In this debate, issues of science, clinical care, and the legal
system have come together, often without any acknowledgment of their
differences. The failure, inability, unwillingness, or reluctance to recall an
event leads to different hypotheses regarding the phenomenon we casually call
"forgetting." To complicate matters further, we know that people
often forget the times when they did remember. Evidence, data, methods of
obtaining data, and criteria for establishing proof are quite different in the
fields of science, clinical care, and the law. McNally provides a good review
of the literature of cognitive psychology on the recall of traumatic events,
reminding us that recall is a function of our experience, the neurobiologic
limitations of our memory apparatus, and our present context. The process of
recall often involves remembering an event that one knows but may not have
thought of recently or even for a long time, rather than
"remembering" an event of which one was never before aware. The book
covers many aspects of this question, from amnesia to belief, perhaps dwelling
too much on post-traumatic stress disorder, repression, and dissociation. Among
the studies McNally discusses are two sets that address the specific questions
of the recall of sexual abuse particularly well. The first set comprises
prospective studies of abused children who were followed as adults. Although
McNally tends to interpret these studies as supporting the view that adults
nearly always recall documented childhood sexual abuse, the studies also
indicate that some adults (10 to 22 percent) do not. Yes, this finding supports
the conclusion that forgetting childhood sexual abuse is not the norm. However,
it also indicates, within the limits of these studies, that such forgetting
does occur. The second set of studies compares aspects of memory function in
three groups of adults: those reporting unconfirmed recovered memories of
childhood sexual abuse, those reporting repressed memories of childhood sexual
abuse (i.e., they do not recall the sexual abuse, but they think they were
abused), and those reporting no history of childhood sexual abuse. The author
leads the reader by suggesting that there "should have been"
differences in memory function among these groups according to whether the
sexual trauma was repressed, dissociated, or forgotten. However, a more neutral
interpretation of these studies would be that the null hypothesis was not
rejected and that the three groups were therefore surprisingly similar.
Interestingly, persons who reported repressed memories were more likely than
those in the other groups to score high on tests that measure psychological
distress. Either some adults with psychological distress come to believe they
have been sexually abused in childhood or, equally possible (although
inexplicably demoted to less importance in the book), those who report
repressed memories do indeed have more psychological distress. The proverbial
chicken-and-egg problem cannot be resolved by these studies. Is trauma a
problem of memory? The recall of traumatic events (and post-traumatic stress
disorder) is as much a problem of forgetting as of recalling. The inability to
forget and the resultant generalization of the threat result in impairment
rather than in protection from danger. The enduring questions regarding memory
and traumatic events are not solved in this book, but we are educated about
them. The recall of childhood sexual abuse is never established without
independent confirmation -- a lesson that is taught well in this book and one
that our scientists, clinicians, and legal system must not forget.
www.amazon.com
Larry R. Squire,
Here we have the most comprehensive and sober treatment yet undertaken
of this sensitive and provocative topic.
Book Description
Are horrific experiences indelibly fixed in a victim's memory? Or does the mind
protect itself by banishing traumatic memories from consciousness? How victims
remember trauma is the most controversial issue in psychology today, spilling
out of consulting rooms and laboratories to capture headlines, rupture
families, provoke legislative change, and influence criminal trials and civil
suits. This book, by a clinician who is also a laboratory researcher, is the
first comprehensive, balanced analysis of the clinical and scientific evidence
bearing on this issue--and the first to provide definitive answers to the
urgent questions at the heart of the controversy.
Synthesizing clinical case reports and the vast research literature on the
effects of stress, suggestion, and trauma on memory, Richard McNally arrives at
significant conclusions, first and foremost that traumatic experiences are
indeed unforgettable. Though people sometimes do not think about disturbing
experiences for long periods of time, traumatic events rarely slip from
awareness for very long; furthermore, McNally reminds us, failure to think about
traumas--such as early sexual abuse--must not be confused with amnesia or an
inability to remember them. In fact, the evidence for repressed memories of
trauma--or even for repression at all--is surprisingly weak.
A magisterial work of scholarship, panoramic in scope and nonpartisan
throughout, this unfailingly lucid work will prove indispensable to anyone
seeking to understand how people remember trauma.
www.amazon.com
William Scott Scherk from Prince George,
British Columbia Canada
September 21, 2003
Compelling, disturbing, expansive:
McNally's book is required reading for those interested in the controversies
over "recovered memories of trauma." His tone is even, sometimes wry,
but never accusatory towards those who may not share his conclusions. Of particular interest is his attention to
various studies that have been used by both "sides" in the debates.
For example, in his chapter "Traumatic Amnesia," a reader will find a
sober evaluation of theories presented by such worthies as Terr, van der Kolk,
and JJ Freyd -- here McNally drills down into the meat of the supporting data
used to flesh out the theories, and in so doing, lays out the exact areas of
dispute. Ms Crook's review makes one important error: The Freyd study she notes
did not assess for PTSD, and so is not comparable to McNally's laboratory work.