Review of Recollections of trauma: Scientific evidence and clinical practice.

Abstract

J. DONALD READ and D. STEPHEN LINDSAY, Editors Recollections of Trauma: Scientific Evidence and Clinical Practice New York: Plenum Press (NATO ASI Series: Series A, Life Sciences, Vol. 291), 1997, xii + 600 pp. (ISBN 0-306-45618-4, us$197.00, Hardcover) Reviewed by WILLIAM E. SMYTHE This book is a serious and ambitious attempt to bring various forms of professional expertise to bear on vexed issue of psychotherapeutically recovered versus memories of childhood sexual abuse and trauma. While one might dispute editors' suggestion that this is perhaps the most important issue in professional psychology in 1990s (p. v), it has nonetheless become a highly visible and controversial topic. And it is one with potentially far-ranging implications, for it not only challenges our current understanding of psychological trauma and psychotherapeutic practice, but also of workings of human memory itself. The volume is outcome of a NATO Advanced Studies Institute (ASI) that took place over an 11-day period at Les Jardins de l'Atlantique in France. It reflects input of no fewer than 95 participants, most of them psychologists, with a minority of contributors from other relevant fields such as anthropology and legal profession. The explicit aim of this collaborative undertaking was to promote productive dialogue among various stakeholders in recovered memory debate, especially among researchers and clinicians, whose views on these issues are often highly divergent. The final product bears witness to successful achievement of this aim. One appealing feature of this volume is that it is organized in a way that conveys what actually happened during 11-day meeting. Unlike those conference proceedings volumes that are organized after fact according to hastily conceived notions of thematic coherence, this one attempts to capture something of process, in addition to content, of debate. The core of volume is 13 chapters based on primary lectures of major contributors to ASI, each presented in order in which it was given at meeting and each followed by a brief, invited commentary and excerpts from a 30-minute discussion period. This part of volume is followed by 15 shorter papers on a wide range of topics, six more papers from a symposium on legal issues, reports of five different working groups that met throughout conference, and abstracts of 58 poster presentations. Working through this wealth of material, in order in which it was originally presented, leaves reader with a vivid impression of what it must have been like to have actually attended ASI or, at least, wishing one could have done so. The issues under debate in this volume are often viewed as highly contentious and divisive ones. Elizabeth Loftus writes, in her chapter, of (un)civil memory wars, for example. However, there is little indication of lack of civility in interactions among contributors. The extremist views that marked early debates on issue of recovered versus memories of abuse have now given way to more moderate, consensual position (what John Briere, in his commentary on opening chapter, calls middle position) that recovery of veridical memories of long-forgotten abuse is possible in psychotherapy but that psychotherapy also has potential to implant non-veridical or false memories of abuse. Moreover, one possibility does not preclude other. As Bowers and Farvolden (1996) stated in their landmark article on topic, Recovery of repressed memories of sexual abuse is logically independent of claim that such memories are iatrogenically created. Accordingly, evidence for suggested-false memory is not automatically evidence against repressed-recovered memory, and vice versa (p. 355). The Bowers and Farvolden article sets stage for kind of balanced treatment of issues that tends to characterize more recent literature on this topic. …