Remembering Trauma by Richard J. McNally, Harvard University Press, 拢23.50/$35, ISBN 0674010825
CAN psychology ever be really dangerous? With the thorough, low-key style of a UN weapons inspector, Richard McNally, professor of psychology at Harvard, shows in this important book that debased psychological ideas can indeed generate weapons of mass destruction. Unlike Hans Blix, he has been able to ferret them out and show how they have been misused.
McNally illustrates in a measured, sometimes wry tone how contagious the pathogens of flawed psychology can be if they infest and spread through that most fundamental of psychological processes, memory. If, as is widely believed, remembrance of trauma, especially sexual trauma, is inherently destructive, then the germs are present for a plague of post-traumatic stress and its damaging sequelae. The next stage in the production of the weapon is to modify what people think they remember.
Advertisement
McNally highlights the political significance of debates about the impact of memories of abuse, citing what he rightly calls the 鈥渆gregious example鈥� of the US Congress. In 1999, these politicians condemned a paper published in a major journal reporting a thorough meta-analysis of 59 studies of the impact of childhood sexual abuse. The results challenged the commonly held belief that such abuse inevitably produces psychological dysfunction.
McNally dispassionately explains what is now understood about the essentially constructive nature of memory. In an exhaustive and commendably up-to-date review of clinical reports, laboratory studies and neuroscience examinations, he shows that experience of some traumas under some circumstances can of course be psychologically destructive, but that does not relate to how, or if, they are remembered. The central psychological challenge we all face with severe traumas is, as with all other emotionally significant events, that we remember them all too well.
We can cope with painful memories by not dwelling on them and pushing them out of daily awareness. But that is very different from losing access to them in the way proposed by many psychotherapists. The extremely well-documented finding that 鈥渞epressed memories鈥� are very unlikely is of widespread significance. It provides a potential cure for the madness that has destroyed hundreds, possibly thousands, of families whose members had memories 鈥渞ecovered鈥� in therapy 鈥� memories that had no basis in reality. There are still people languishing in prison, convicted on the basis of memories that were created by invasive psychotherapeutic intervention.
The mechanisms by which therapists, police interrogators and others can lead people to believe that they remember events that did not occur are carefully described by McNally. He discusses recent archival research that reveals how these have their origins in Freud鈥檚 manipulative psychoanalytic techniques. This led him to draw out remembrance of sexual abuse in childhood that had no actual basis. Even more damaging to his later Oedipal theory, was that the memories he recovered about his patients鈥� childhood did not relate to abuse by their fathers. His view that he was drawing out fantasy, not fact, from his patients was deformed by how Freud himself distorted his memory of what those fantasies were.
Anyone interested in understanding how trauma is remembered must read this book. And anyone who has been poisoned by 鈥渞ecovered memories鈥�, as victim or accused, will find it a powerful antidote.