Repression And Recovery

A poststructuralist literary history - Nelson's premise that the history of modernist culture is one we no longer know we have forgotten and he aims to recover the political questions many forgotten modern poets looked straight in the eye.

Buried memories of sexual abuse can have a devastating impact on a victim's relationships, work, and health. Using case histories, Renee Fredrickson stresses the importance of recovering these memories as a crucial step in healing, and she explains various therapeutic processes used in memory retrieval.

The question of whether memories can be lost, particularly as a result of trauma, and then "recovered" through psychotherapy has polarised the field of memory research. This is the first volume to bring together leading memory researchers and clinicians with the aiming of facilitating aresolution to this question. The volume offers a unique and timely summary of the theories of memory recovery, and how false memories may be created. Some of the first research relating to the phenomenal characteristics of memory recovered is reported in detail, suggesting important avenues fornew research. Theories of autobiographical memory, implicit memory, reminiscence, and the effects of repeated recall on memory are included. Recovered memories and false memories provides the most current and authoritative thinking in this area, and will be an essential sourcebook for memoryresearchers and psychotherapists.

Maintains that there is no controlled scientific evidence that memories of trauma may be "recovered" years later.

The question of memory recovery is now more important than ever with the controversy over delayed recall and false memory having spilled over from psychology to the courts and the public media. The Recovery of Unconscious Memories provides a comprehensive scientific treatment of a century of research that integrates for the first time the findings of the clinic and the laboratory. Included are authoritative treatments of hypnotic hypermnesia, free association and forced recall, the recovery of subliminal stimuli in dreams and fantasy, electrical recall, recovery of sensory-motor skills (also symptoms or "sick skills"), and modern mathematical decision theory analyses of true and false memories. Erdelyi's own ground-breaking research is presented, including his recent discovery of striking memory recoveries in long-delayed recall probes administered months after last testing. In a technical appendix, Erdelyi unveils for the first time a methodological solution to the problem of response bias in narrative recall.

Possibly no other psychoanalytic concept has caused as much ongoing controversy, and attracted so much criticism, as that of 'repression'. Repression involves denying knowledge to oneself about the content of one's own mind and is most commonly implicated in disputes concerning the possibility of repressed memories of trauma (and their subsequent recovery). While fundamental in Freudian psychoanalysis, recent developments in psychoanalytic thinking (e.g., 'mentalization') have downplayed the importance of repression, in part due to less emphasis being placed on the importance of memory within therapy.

In this groundbreaking book, a leading clinical psychiatrist redefines how we think about and treat victims of trauma. A "stunning achievement" that remains a "classic for our generation." (Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., author of The Body Keeps the Score). Trauma and Recovery is revered as the seminal text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a broader political frame, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war. Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud," Trauma and Recovery is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand how we heal and are healed.

This book presents a reinterpretation of Freud to show how language can be expressive and repressive.