You can’t keep a bad idea down. You fight it with all weapons at hand—science, reason, research, history, and, when they fail, yelling—until you are sure it is dead as a doornail. Then, one day while you are quietly reading the latest terrifying news, you see a revenant: the corpse reawakens. For us, that was last year’s blockbuster, Amy Griffin’s The Tell, which told readers that although she had no evidence supporting her MDMA-triggered “recovered” memory of being sexually abused in middle school, she knows it happened. No corroboration from teachers or classmates about it, no supporting evidence from the investigators she had hired, no confrontation with the alleged abuser; her recovered memory was all the evidence she needed.
Griffin’s deduction is straight out of The Courage to Heal, whose authors wrote, in 1991, “If you are unable to remember any specific instances … but still have a feeling that something abusive happened to you, it probably did … If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were.” Griffin repeats the same incoherent reasoning. As she writes: “There was no smoking gun, no physical evidence, no tangible proof … I trusted myself. That was enough.”
But as revenants go, Griffin’s megahit pales in contrast to Bessel van der Kolk’s recent $10 million deal for his next book. Few have done more to perpetuate the belief in “repressed memories” of trauma, and its effectively indistinguishable cousin “dissociative amnesia,” than he did with The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Having lost the argument that repressed memories are stored pristinely in the brain, he moved to their being stored in the body. First published in 2014, van der Kolk’s book has been a New York Times bestseller for years and currently has over 84,000 positive ratings on Amazon. Apparently conquering half the world wasn’t sufficient, so van der Kolk is expanding his message, this time with “Score’s” sequel, Come to Your Senses, with a workbook for readers to try out his theories, and two children’s books to reach a “younger audience.”
The two of us have fought the good fight over repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, a controversy that erupted in fury in the 1990s and was among the most contentious ever to embroil psychology and psychiatry. One of us (McNally), a clinical psychological scientist at Harvard, has been studying memory and trauma for decades, and often found himself opposing van der Kolk’s ideas in popular magazines, professional journals, and amicus briefs in trials of adults accused of sexual abuse by plaintiffs who claimed to have “recovered,” albeit uncorroborated, memories; the other (Tavris), a social psychologist, has examined this phenomenon as one of the psychological epidemics and moral panics that sweep across our nation with depressing regularity.
Each episode seems to come out of thin air, wreaks enormous havoc, subsides and is forgotten. No doubt that 30 years after the Salem witch trials of 1692–93, parents tried to teach their children about the hysteria that led to the executions of 20 people, the imprisonment of 150 others, and accusations against another 200. “George, sit down here so I can tell you how Giles Corey was pressed to death by these crazy people,” a parent would say. “Aw, Ma,” young George probably replied, “that was so 17th century.”
We know that trying to criticize van der Kolk’s arguments is like criticizing Christmas …
Today, we both are feeling so 20th century. Most Millennials and all members of Gen Z are too young to recall the scientific, clinical, and legal controversies that characterized the Memory Wars of the 1990s, but memoirs like Griffin’s and books like van der Kolk’s are bringing them back. We know that trying to criticize van der Kolk’s arguments is like criticizing Christmas, and we will undoubtedly hear from 83,475 of those 84,000 Amazon readers, but let’s examine the evidence for two of the bedrock beliefs of van der Kolk: that memories of trauma are fragmented, disorganized, decontextualized, and stored in “somatic memory,” and healing therefore entails weaving such scattered fragments into a coherent narrative of what happened. Once a patient forms a coherent narrative, symptoms are assumed to diminish.
Does any of this actually happen? In their comprehensive investigation of memory fragmentation, psychologist David Rubin and colleagues tested 60 adult trauma survivors, half of whom had PTSD and half had never had PTSD. The two groups did not differ demographically nor did the trauma survivors differ on types of trauma they had suffered. They all recounted their three most stressful or traumatic memories, their three most positive memories, and their three most important memories. The researchers used many measures of coherence to measure the degree of fragmentation in these memories and found that trauma memories were no less coherent than other kinds. The traumatic memories of people with PTSD were not less coherent than those of people who never had PTSD.
The clinical relevance of narrative fragmentation rests on its role in maintaining PTSD. According to van der Kolk, once the memories become integrated into a coherent narrative of the trauma, then intrusive recollections, nightmares, and flashbacks will diminish in frequency and intensity. In one of many studies designed to test this hypothesis in PTSD patients, each person furnished three narratives: one concerning the trauma, one concerning a positive experience, and one concerning a negative but nontraumatic experience. Using independent ratings, self-report ratings, and objective measures of narrative structure, the researchers assessed the fragmentation of these memories pre- and post-treatment with medication or exposure therapy. Memory fragmentation did not reliably change across the course of treatment on any measure. Further, the people who had fragmented trauma narratives also had fragmented memories of their positive and their nontraumatic negative memories, meaning that “fragmentation” was their characteristic style of recounting all autobiographical memories.
Repressed-memory clinicians rarely pause to consider how suggestion, influence, and popular beliefs help determine how those fragments are “woven” together …
And what is a “coherent” memory anyway? Repressed-memory clinicians rarely pause to consider how suggestion, influence, and popular beliefs help determine how those fragments are “woven” together, leading a patient to conclude “obviously I must have been abused.” It’s the explanation du jour, after all.
McNally and his team compared the memories of four groups: the repressed memory group believed they must have been sexually abused although they had no memories of any molestation; the recovered memory group, who had in fact been sexually abused but had not thought about it for a long time prior to recollecting it; the continuous memory group, who reported they had never forgotten having been abused in childhood. A control group that had no experience with sexual abuse. The adults reporting recovered and repressed memories of abuse had problems with “reality monitoring,” difficulty distinguishing between memories of something they imagined (“fantasy”) from memories of something they perceived (“reality”). Anyone who has difficulty making such a distinction may be especially prone to mistakenly assume that images surfacing during recovered memory therapies, such as journaling and guided imagery, signify genuine autobiographical memories.
In 1952, the British psychiatrist Lionel Penrose provided an explanation for the rise, fall, and possible return of the concept of repressed memories of trauma. Penrose borrowed concepts from the epidemiology of the infectious disease in mathematically modeling fluctuations in ideas, fads, and “crazes” in society from the benign (e.g., the hula hoop fad in the early 1960s) to the deadly (e.g., the witchcraft panic in Salem). He likened such concepts to a virus lurking in society that spreads slowly and then increases exponentially before peaking and then declining as acquired immunity grows, reducing the number of vulnerable hosts. But the virus does not disappear; it remains dormant until conditions ripen for the next epidemic.
The “virus” of claims about repressed and recovered memories of trauma has now found a new generation of “host” humans, multiplied by the internet. Like the victims of the deadly anti-vaccine movement, they live in silos insulated from science, hoping their bodies, if not their brains, will yield answers to their suffering. In the meantime, a powerful antidote is psychiatrist Michael Scheeringa’s book The Body Does Not Keep the Score: How Popular Beliefs About Trauma Are Wrong, which not only demolishes van der Kolk’s claims but shows that van der Kolk appears to have misunderstood the very studies he cites in support of his theory. It’s a sad sign of the times that it only has 24 Amazon reviews.
