Peter
Ellis Org : Seeking Justice for Peter Ellis
The
Books Ç return to index
P - Authors
Parkin, Alan J Memory and Amnesia,
1997
Pendergrast, Mark Victims of Memory, 1995
Piper; August, Jr Hoax and Reality, 1997
Pope,
Prager, Jeffrey Presenting the Past,
1998
Parkin, Alan J
Memory and Amnesia, 1997
An introduction, Second edition
Pendergrast, Mark
Victims of Memory, 1995
Sex abuse accusations and shattered lives
Reviews
Synopsis
An honest account of a father's loss and his plea for reconciliation, this
book is also a definitive scholarly work on recovered memory therapy and is
widely hailed by professional psychologists.
The publisher , November 17, 1997
Review Excerpts of VICTIMS OF MEMORY
VICTIMS OF MEMORY: SEX ABUSE ACCUSATIONS AND SHATTERED LIVES
* An even-handed treatment that presents all the different positions with
empathy. --Psychological Reports
* Anyone touched by the subject of repressed memories would do well to read
this book. -- Burton Einspruch, M.D., Journal of the American Medical
Association
* An impressive display of scholarship. Pendergrast demonstrates a laudable
ability to lay out all sides of the argument. --Daniel L. Schacter, Scientific
American
* Victims of Memory constitutes the most ambitious and comprehensive, as well
as the most emotionally committed, of all the studies before us. Pendergrast
devotes the most effort to analyzing the contemporary Zeitgeist in which the
recovery movement thrives. --Frederick Crews, The New York Review of Books
From Booklist, January 1, 1995
They're staples on talk shows--adult incest survivors who have only
recently recovered memories of being abused. Until lately, it was politically
correct to believe the abused, never the accused. Then parents and others who
felt themselves unjustly accused banded together to form the False Memory
Syndrome Foundation. What is going on here? Pendergrast has written a
well-researched and important book, and his findings should rightfully scare
all of us. Pendergrast, it must be said, is not an objective reporter: his own
daughters have accused him of abuse. His shock at their allegations sparked a
personal crisis, leading to the writing of this book. Despite his conflict of
interest, Pendergrast tries for evenhandedness, going so far as to offer
in-their-own-words chapters by those with repressed memories and the therapists
who treat them. But there is also a chapter from the "retractors,"
women who have realized that their memories of abuse were only products of
their own imaginations.
Pendergrast's account of this controversial subject is wide ranging. He covers
everything from the nature of memory and hypnosis to such related forms of
sexual hysteria as the
Synopsis
Taking on the issue of "repressed memories" in incest cases, the
author speaks from painful experience and questions whether therapists are
revealing actual happenings through hypnosis, guided imagery, dream analysis,
and suggestion--or shattering lives with false accusations. Original. IP.
Thousands of families have been shattered by therapies which encourage
adults to remember childhood sexual abuse patterns repressed over time: but has
the therapeutic approach gone too far and instead victimized adult women
further? This title's sure to prove controversial in many circles: it tackles
issues of healing, therapy, and memory reconstruction.
Pope, Harrison
Psychology Astray, 1997
Fallacies in Studies of 'Repressed Memory' and Childhood Trauma
Reviews
Stuart Sutherland, Nature, July 17, 1997
Harrison Pope's Psychology Astray is a "model of clear thinking and
clear exposition. It outlines the pitfalls of epidemiology such as confounding
causes: post hoc does not mean propter hoc-two correlated events may have a
common cause, such as genetic factors.
To clarify his argument, he analyzes widely held but mistaken popular and
medical myths: for example, that salt is bad for you, that power lines damage
the body, and that schizophrenia is caused by bad upbringing. Pope's careful
analysis of possible sources of error should be useful to intending
epidemiologists, and regrettably some practising ones, and to other disciplines
within the social sciences
Book Description
Can individuals "repress" the memory of traumatic childhood
experiences? Does childhood sexual abuse cause victims to develop psychiatric
disorders years later in adulthood? Dr. Harrison Pope examines the evidence for
these two hypotheses, and takes a rigorous and incisive look at the studies
available. His conclusions are startling-there is presently no satisfactory
evidence that people can actually "repress" memories, nor is there
adequate evidence that childhood sexual abuse causes adult psychiatric
disorders. The fact remains that the "evidence" cited in many of
these studies can be more readily explained by more mundane processes, such as
early childhood amnesia, ordinary forgetfulness, or elective non-disclosure.
Psychology Astray is written for students and scholars in the fields of
psychology, mental health, medical research and law. The flaws in existing
studies are exposed and illustrated, using simple and colorful analogies from
ordinary life which everyone can understand.
Prager, Jeffrey
Presenting the Past, 1998
Psychoanalysis and Sociology of misremembering
Reviews
At the core of Presenting the Past is the dramatic and troubling case of a
woman who during the course of her analysis began to recall scenes of her own
childhood sexual abuse. Later the patient came to believe that the trauma she
remembered as a physical violation might have been an emotional violation and
that she might have composed a memory out of present and past relationships.
But what was accurate and true? And what evidence could be persuasive and
valuable? Could the analyst trust either her convictions or his own? Using this
case and others, Prager explores the nature of memory and its relation to the
interpersonal, therapeutic, and cultural worlds in which remembering occurs.
Synthesizing research from social science, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and
cognitive psychology, Prager uses clinical examples to argue more generally
that our memories are never simple records of events, but are constantly
evolving constructions, affected by contemporary culture as well as by our own
private lives. He demonstrates the need that sociology has for the insights of
psychoanalysis, and the need that psychoanalysis has for the insights of
sociology.
The publisher, Harvard University Press ,
September 3, 1998
“In this compelling book, Jeffrey
Prager has created a sociology of memory, showing how memory is situated in
interpersonal contexts, and draws from cultural tropes. At the same time, he
challenges the social sciences to open their epistemological and methodological
doors to case studies of individuals and to recognize that subjectivity is
personally created rather than socially or culturally determined.
Psychoanalysis, he documents, takes us well beyond the experientially and
interpretively thin sociological subject.” —Nancy J. Chodorow, Member and
Faculty, San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute and Professor of Sociology,
University of California, Berkeley
“No debate has become more vexed in recent decades than that about human
memory, and no one has brought more intelligence, balance, and gentleness to
that debate than Jeffrey Prager. He gives us a brilliant clinical
interpretation of a patient who successively ‘doesn’t remember,’ ‘remembers,’
and ‘unremembers’ childhood sexual ‘experiences’ and then brings alive vast,
additional ranges of psychological and social evidence about memory. How often
is a book so scholarly also so compelling that one can’t put it down? Almost
never, but that is what happened to me.” —Neil Smelser, Director, Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
“This talented writer brings together insights from sociology and
psychoanalysis to give new meaning to the malleability of human memory. His
readers will take away a deep appreciation for this fundamental truth: memory
cannot be set apart from the personal, temporal, and cultural context in which
it occurs.”—Elizabeth Loftus, Professor of Psychology,