Smiling Through Tears

Rating:
Summary: An authorative book that is extremely readable.
Review: For those interested in the subject of repressed memory and who are looking for a relatively light treatement of a very difficult and painful subject, this is the book. It has all the necessary information, reads easily and can be given to family or friends who want to know more about the topic. The cartoons help make the book more readable.

Rating:
Summary: excellent rejoinder to the advocates of 'memory work'
Review: Psychotherapists and clients alike need to read this book or the other excellent similar ones outlining the perils of embarking on "memory work" therapy with a True Believer for a therapist.

I appreciated the previous reviewer's comment: "Ziggy on the cover - enough said". In other words, putting a cartoon on a serious book means you're in denial. That kind of ad hominem smear is really typical of True Believers in 'memory work'. Part of their worldview is that they can always tell (human) books by their covers. Specifically, they believe they know the underlying cause of any anxiety attack, off-color remark, depressed mood, nightmare, or other nonspecific symptom that any adult has in our society: Repressed memories of sexual abuse. As Bass & Davis so tellingly acknowledged in earlier editions of The Courage To Heal, in "hundreds of cases" they had never encountered a single woman who "suspected she might have been abused, explored it, and determined that she wasn't." Think about that illogic for a moment! In the newest edition they begrudgingly and very belatedly admit that counselors have sometimes "pushed clients to acknowledge abuse...that did not occur." What Bass and Davis sadly still fail to acknowledge is that memory is so highly suggestible that even without overt "pushing", false memories of abuse can emerge in any suggestible context. I don't know what happened in the Freyd family in particular, but regardless of their personal history, to ignore the MOUNTAIN of evidence indicating malleability of memory (summarized here by Freyd senior, elsewhere more expertly by Ofshe, Loftus, and others) is >real< denial.

Rating:
Summary: The Creative Power of Denial
Review: Skip this pseudoscientific rubbish or, better yet, read it and see the lengths that denial will go to. Ziggy on the cover. This says it all, folks. If you want to read a substantial work on this subject read Betrayal Trauma : The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse by Jennifer J. Freyd. Jennifer being the daughter in this family.