Remembering Trauma. – book review
Harvard University Press, April 2003 By Richard J. McNally, Ph.D.
We may refuse to disclose, but we never forget. Or so posits Harvard professor Richard J. McNally, Ph.D., whose studies of combat veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder, survivors of childhood sexual abuse and people who claim to have suffered at the hands of satanic cults or space aliens (see “Cracking the Harvard X-Files” on page 66) consistently confirm that we do not repress memories of trauma. McNally argues against a decade’s worth of high-profile research that he deems “psychiatric folklore.” This includes dissociating memories of trauma, hypnotic regression to recover “repressed” memories and the idea that elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol can shrink the hippocampus, a brain region associated with memory.–K.P.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Sussex Publishers, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group