Suppressed Memories

Another review from the August 15 TLS summarizes the findings of Richard J. McNally's Remembering Trauma, a study of the issue of suppressed memories. McNally's research, by the reviewer's account, is exhaustive and his conclusions devastating. Here are some excerpts:

McNally resists the conciliatory impulse to take a middle ground, perhaps along the lines of "recovered memories occur more often than some people think but less than others think." Nonsense, he says. Some people think the world is round and others may say it is flat, but "neither science nor reason requires us to conclude that the world is therefore oblong." There are no oblong compromises in Remembering Trauma, only the most scrupulous conclusions based on what the evidence shows, or fails to show. "The notion that the mind protects itsself by represssing or dissociating memories of trauma, rendering them inaccessibly to awareness," McNally summarizes, "is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support."

McNally's goal is to explain and to persuade, which he does with a dazzling accumulation of evidence from a vast array of sources: laboratory research, physiological studies of the brain, clinical case studies and studies of survivors of war, torture, rape, incest, sniper attacks and other horrific experiences. The problem for survivors is not repressing their memories; it is that they have trouble forgetting them. People may not think about disturbing events or talk about them for long periods of time and then recall them later, but there is no reason, McNally observes, to "postulate a special mechanism of repression or dissocation" to explain this.

Especially damning for the claims of the trauma industry is that most survivors of trauma eventually overcome their emotional distress — particularly if they can avoid the well-meaning interventions of trauma counsellors. (A recent Cochrane report found that psychological counselling in the aftermath of trauma is useless at best and harmful at worst, prolonging or worsening the symptoms.) Of course, some survivors do continue to suffer extreme emotional symptoms years after a trauma, but the reasons seem to have less to do with the nature of the trauma itself than with their own genetic predispositions, brain anomalies and psychological resources.

If this is all true, it's pretty devastating. One comment by the reviewer, however, leaves me somewhat skeptical about McNally's conclusions. She draws a distinction between "scientists and clinicians in how they reason and the evidence they rely on to draw conclusions." McNally, being a scientific type, cannot accept the vagueness of the terminology and judgments of the therapeutic community. But surely memory and the workings of the mind generally are not the kinds of things that can be reduced to sharply defined formulae. Its workings are just too complex, and perhaps the vagueness of the clinician gets at something that the precision of the scientist misses. This is not to state any particular support for the idea of repressed memory, only skepticism that these are the kinds of things that can be determined by "laboratory research and physiological studies of the brain."

Augustine, one of the great psychologists of Western history, could have taught us that much.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, August 31, 2003 at 10:26 PM

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