"If
faced with a choice between being miserable and not knowing why, and being
miserable and being able to blame someone else, may people will choose the
latter". (McNally, p. 231)

Remembering
Trauma by Richard J. McNally is a refreshing text. It bluntly challenges
some of the most contested and controversial issues in the study of trauma and
its effect on memory and deflates the many myths and illusions that are still
obscuring our understanding of memory and trauma.

Take for example the still commonly
held belief that survivors of trauma somehow develop skills to get rid of
disturbing thoughts related to the traumatic event. McNally calls this commonly
accepted theory of traumatic amnesia "psychiatric folklore" as there
simply is no convincing evidence to believe that we can banish traumatic
memories and retrieve them later on. Laboratory research for example, reveals
that abuse survivors are no better at forgetting than anybody else. Survivors
rarely forget trauma, unless there is physical damage to the brain. And the
intense emotions experienced by people during a traumatic or stressful event
enhance the memory for central aspects of the experience rather than making
them subject to amnesia. This, asserts McNally, makes perfect sense from an
evolutionary standpoint. Indeed, it is hard to envision how for example the
Cro-Magnons would have made it through the ice age for as long as they did had
they suppressed all memories of stressful saber-tooth attacks. From an
evolutionary standpoint, one can really only image memory-structures allowing
for, even enhancing, memory for dangerous or otherwise significant events to
evolve. McNally exhibits much of the research in support of traumatic amnesia
as troubled by sloppy data, misinterpretation and conceptual as well as
empirical problems. The evidence for traumatic amnesia is, in a word of
McNally, seriously flawed.

Another contested issue in the field
of trauma that McNally challenges in Remembering
Trauma is that of false memories. Would you think it is possible for
someone to remember a traumatic event that never actually happened? Well, it
is. No matter how absurd the idea may seem, McNally explains how people do
occasionally remember violence that never came about and how they end up
experiencing the emotional distress befitting the traumatic nature of the
"remembered" events. One of the most amusing examples given by
McNally to illustrate this remarkable notion is that of "alien
abductees" — people who recover, usually under hypnotic procedures,
memories of having been abducted by space aliens (coincidentally, McNally notes
that seventeen percent of Americans believe that space aliens have abducted
people for use in medical experiments). McNally describes and evaluates the
research on recovered memories. Not only, says McNally, do the narratives of
"alien abductees" clearly show that people can develop false
memories, psychotherapy sometimes contributes to this phenomenon when
suggestive and flawed psychotherapy produces false accounts that clients take
for genuine memories. Memory is, says McNally, reconstructive- and the
nightmares and flashback often associated with the recollection of traumatic
experiences are not, despite the pervasive and persistent tendency of popular
culture to portray them as such, anything like reruns of the same horror movie.
Instead, recollection requires reassembly and this reassembly is not flawless.
Stronger still, it is possible to reassemble a memory of something that never
took place. Throughout the 1980s for example, many people recovered memories of
horrifying but non-existent satanic abuse rituals. During the same time-span,
children began disclosing memories of ritual abuse at the hands of day care
workers- that never occurred. These memories were by and large recovered in
psychotherapy, prior to which very few people knew they had been
victimized. 

McNally also touches on other
controversies surrounding the field of trauma and memory, such as the PTSD
debate and the massive fraud associated with "phony combat vets." And
as many experiences — including overhearing obnoxious sexual jokes and
fender-benders — are now, no doubt guided by courtroom profits (McNally
devotes one section to PTSD in the court-room), endorsed as traumatic, McNally
contemplates the question as to what "counts" as trauma.

The one controversy McNally
regrettably remains silent on is the politics of (false) collective memory. Collective
memory too can be distorted to fabricate positive images of the "we"
group, and negative images of the "them" group. The Dutch, for
instance (my own origin) quite happily preserve, despite a rather poor track
record as far as active resistance during the German occupation during WWII is
concerned, a collective illusionary memory of joint resistance against the
German occupation. Collective memory is distorted to allow for a more positive
image of the Dutch than reality might have it, and this "new", false
and collective memory is sustained with all its side effects (Dutch-German
soccer match hostilities being just one of those). In a global context rife
with ongoing ethnic conflict the question of the political nature of collective
memory would have been worth discussing.

Nonetheless, McNally covers in Remembering Trauma much of the vast body
of literature on the effects of trauma on mental processes, especially memory.
This wide scope covered in Remembering
Trauma makes it an invaluable book for anyone interested in trauma and its
effects on mental processes, especially memory. McNally’s down to earth
approach and his plain and accessible language make the complexity of the topic
comprehensible also for readers who are new to the topic and more comprehensible
for those already familiar with it.  

© 2005 Gerda Wever-Rabehl

Gerda Wever-Rabehl
holds a Ph.D from Simon Fraser University, and has published extensively in the
areas of social science, philosophy and philosophy of education.

Categories: MentalHealth