Taking Recovered Memories Seriously

Lawrence E. Hedges^*

ABSTRACT: The current "recovered memory" controversy uncritically collapses various kinds of clinical and research findings over quite different types of remembering and forgetting.  This paper examines the popular video camera theory of memory which erroneously assumes that (a) humans record in accurate detailed memory the facts of their existence, (b) massive amnesia or repression for externally generated traumatic stimuli is a common occurrence, (c) accurate recall for factual details of early childhood experience is a possibility and (d) under altered states which are hypnotically, chemically, or psychotherapeutically induced, the "veil of repression" can be lifted and long-ago facts uncovered.  This video camera theory of memory is considered in light of four theories of memory — primary repression, splitting, dissociation, and secondary repression — that have emerged in psychoanalysis.  None of these supports the video camera notion.

Greens' (1986) formulations of "the dead mother," Khan's (1963) formulations regarding "cumulative trauma," and Winnicott's (1965) formulations regarding the nature of infantile memories and how they may be revived for psychoanalytic study do offer explanatory hypotheses for the kinds of memory emerging in "recovery" therapy.  But though these concepts support the emergence of infantile memory in the here-and-now transference situation, the techniques advocated by the recovery community would be seen by these psychoanalysts as providing relief through acting out of the transference and resistance memories, rather than providing a therapeutically transformative approach.  Therapists who collude in "believing," "validating," and "supporting redress" not only ally with the client in avoiding the terrifying and painful reliving of crucial early childhood memories, but also create serious liability problems for themselves.

Explanations and therapeutic techniques which uncritically collapse a variety of types of memory, forms of transference and resistance, and diverse developmental issues will produce confusion and error.  The people recovering memories of early childhood trauma must be taken seriously — and they deserve much more understanding than they are presently getting.  The heart of psychoanalysis has always been about taking recovered memories seriously.  A variety of suggestions of how to do so are made.
  

PART ONE
The Emerging Scandal Around Recovered Memories

PART TWO
Four Developmentally Determined Forms of Memory

PART THREE
"To Believe or Not to Believe"

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Endnotes

¹ Kohut's term is "selfobject" — as in a "love object" who is experienced as an extension of the self.  [Back]

² It is not possible here to discuss at length the nature of borderline or character issues and their treatment.  I have written extensively on the subject in Listening Perspectives in Psychotherapy ()() (Aronson, 1983) and especially in Interpreting the Countertransference () (Aronson, 1992).  Also, a two-hour videocassette on "Interpreting the Countertransference" I delivered at the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists on May 5, 1990 is available through my office or through Aronson).  [Back]

³ I have two books in press which detail the problems with these kinds of transference and resistance memories and how to treat organizing psychotic issues whether they are pervasive in the whole personality or whether they form only pockets in the personality (as with most people).  The books are Working the Organizing Experience () and Where Love Once Was: In Search of the Lost Mother of Infancy (), both scheduled to be published by Jason Aronson in 1994.  A four-hour videocassette presentation by Dr. Hulgus and myself, also titled "Working the Organizing Experience" is available now through my office and due to be distributed by Jason Aronson prior to release of the books.  [Back]

⁴ Dr. Robert Hilton is Senior Trainer in the Southern California Institute for Bioenergetic Analysis where Dr. Virginia Wink Hilton is Director of Training.  [Back]

⁵ A full review of the psychoanalytic dialogue over the last century on the nature of therapeutic "regressions to dependence" has recently been undertaken by Robert Van Sweden (1993).  [Back]