The Role Of Repression In The Recovery Of Memories Of Childhood Sexual Abuse

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.

Decipher the complex interplay of neurology, psychology, trauma, and memory! In the midst of the controversies over how repressed, false, and recovered memories should be interpreted, Trauma and Cognitive Science presents reliable original research instead of rhetoric. This landmark volume examines the way different traumas influence memory, information processing, and suggestibility. The research provides testable theories on why people forget some kinds of childhood abuse and other traumas. It bridges the cognitive science and clinical approaches to traumatic stress studies. Written by the foremost researchers in the field, including Bessel van der Kolk and Jennifer Freyd, these scientific evaluations of the way traumatic memories are processed offer powerful new perspectives on the interplay of biology and psychology. Trauma and Cognitive Science discusses a range of traumas, including combat, child abuse, and sexual assault across the lifespan. Fascinating perceptual experiments shed light on the cognitive uses of dissociation, the encoding and recall of memory, and the effects of early trauma on subsequent information processing. Trauma and Cognitive Science offers solid information on the most challenging questions in this field: How is memory encoded, stored, and retrieved? How is it forgotten? How does trauma influence these processes? What kinds of memories can be created by suggestion? What physical changes take place in the brain under traumatic stress? How is consciousness disturbed during and after trauma? What are the ethical, clinical, and societal implications of traumatic stress studies? How can people suffering from traumatic memories be healed? Trauma and Cognitive Science also offers an astonishing array of true case studies, including the story of an adult woman who was raped, went to court, and saw her rapist convicted--and then forgot the whole traumatic episode. The independently corroborated accounts of recovered memories and the carefully designed research studies on multiple modes and levels of memory may offer the key to understanding how we remember and why we forget. The results of these controlled scientific studies have wide-ranging implications for abuse survivors, combat veterans, rape victims, and people who have survived traumatic events from earthquakes to car accidents. Written in clear, accessible prose, Trauma and Cognitive Science belongs on the bookshelf of all mental health professionals, researchers in the areas of traumatic stress and child abuse, attorneys, judges, and survivors of abuse and trauma.

Suggestions of Abuse is the first book to address the controversial subject of false memory and sexual abuse--and to offer guidance to both the accuser and the accused. Dr. Yapko reveals why a startling proportion of mental health professionals, ignorant about memory, are unwittingly leading their patients to believe they are victims of abuse.

This book is grounded in the debates of the 1980s and 1990s that surrounded recollections of childhood sexual abuse, particularly those that emerged in the context of psychotherapy. When growing numbers of therapists claimed that they were recovering deeply repressed memories of early sexual violations in their female clients, a wave of alarmed critics countered that therapists were implanting the very memories they were discovering. In looking back at this volatile and heated controversy, Memory Matters takes up disturbing questions that linger concerning memory, sexuality, and childhood. Beginning with a re-analysis of cases from the recovered memory era, the volume goes on to offer fresh perspectives on recollections of childhood sexual abuse. Informed by feminist and critical perspectives within psychology, contributing authors introduce examples from their own qualitative research on processes of remembering. They offer rich examples from a wide range of applied settings, from the courts, psychotherapy, institutions for the disabled, to self-help groups and the media. A shared set of questions is addressed by each of the authors to create a dialogue with the reader on recurring motifs. Memory Matters is an ideal resource for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in the social sciences and legal studies, as well as practitioners in the fields of mental health, crisis services, and the law. Scholarly and accessible in tone, the book also offers helpful insights for professionals working with childhood memory.

Introduction / Charlotte Prozan -- Psychic reality and historical truth / Howard B. Levine -- Repression, dissociation, memory / Murray Bilmes -- An overview of cognitive processes, childhood memory and trauma / Daniel J. Siegel -- A lawyer's view of invented memory: the Ramona case / Ephraim Margolin -- Legal issues for psychotherapists / Mary R. Williams -- Historical truth and narrative truth in psychoanalytic therapy / Jerome D. Oremland -- Uncovering memories of sexual abuse in psychoanalytic psychotherapy / Charlotte Prozan -- Assessment of trauma in the female psychiatric inpatient: impact and treatment implications / JoEllen Brainin-Rodriguez -- Reflection on a false memory of childhood sexual abuse / Jill Jeffrey -- Reconstructing childhood sexual abuse: the case of Penelope / Charlotte Prozan -- Discussion: the retrieval of repressed memories / Katherine Mac Vicar -- Discussion: clinical technique and the political surround: the case of sexual abuse / Stephen Seligman -- Response / Charlotte Prozan.

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

This volume contains two essays by Frederick Crews attacking Freudian psychoanalysis and its aftermath in the so-called recovered memory movement. The first essay reviews a growing body of evidence indicating that Freud doctored his data and manipulated his colleagues in an effort to consolidate a cult-life following that would neither defy nor upstage him. The second essay challenges the scientific and therapeutic claims of the rapidly growing recovered-memory movement, maintaining that its social effects have been devestating.