Victims of Memory: Sex Abuse Accusations and Shattered Lives

Rating:
Summary: Important Book
Review: A good (though heavy) read for anyone exposed to "recovered memories." It is important to remember that recovered memories can feel as real and vivid as true memories- This book takes a huge amount of information and manages to put it in one place. Other reviews have pointed out the non-objectivity and the seeming need for stronger editing, but that is a nearly impossible task to ask of Mark, as directly affected as he was by this tragic movement.

Rating:
Summary: Lacking in objectivity; also fails to address key issues
Review: A good (though heavy) read for anyone exposed to "recovered memories." It is important to remember that recovered memories can feel as real and vivid as true memories- This book takes a huge amount of information and manages to put it in one place. Other reviews have pointed out the non-objectivity and the seeming need for stronger editing, but that is a nearly impossible task to ask of Mark, as directly affected as he was by this tragic movement.

Rating:
Summary: A good overview
Review: Exhaustively researched and persuasively argued, Victims of Memory is another good book in the growing, and needed, field of the debunking of the "recovered memory" movement. Early chapters about the history of the movement and the highlights of its watershed cases are excellent surveys, as are the histories of similar psychological fads such as multiple personality disorder diagnoses, child abuse ring accusations, and even Freudianism.

The book's heart, however, is in the chapters in which the author interviews recovered memory therapists, patients, people accused of abuse based on "recovered" memories, and those who have realized their accusations were false ("retractors"). These chapters are insightful, moving, and surprisingly even-handed.

As a summary of the recovered memory movement and its shortcomings, this book is excellent. It falls down when the author attempts to explain why this strange phenomenon is happening now. He gives us possible reasons from urban malaise through ecological concerns and selfishness to pre-millenial tension. This laundry list of societal factors, which he says proves we are a "society in upheaval," sounds like the same list Democrats use to explain why there are Republicans, Republicans use to explain why there are Democrats, cops use to explain why there are criminals, and old folks use to explain why things were better in their day.

Of course, the most important thing about the recent plague of "recovered" memories is that we understand they are likely false and scrutinize them carefully. Victims of Memory should be useful in raising awareness on the subject, as it is powerful in both its logic and its emotional tone. If it cannot also answer its question, "why now?", well, neither can anyone else.

Rating:
Summary: Misquotes galore
Review: Exhaustively researched and persuasively argued, Victims of Memory is another good book in the growing, and needed, field of the debunking of the "recovered memory" movement. Early chapters about the history of the movement and the highlights of its watershed cases are excellent surveys, as are the histories of similar psychological fads such as multiple personality disorder diagnoses, child abuse ring accusations, and even Freudianism.

The book's heart, however, is in the chapters in which the author interviews recovered memory therapists, patients, people accused of abuse based on "recovered" memories, and those who have realized their accusations were false ("retractors"). These chapters are insightful, moving, and surprisingly even-handed.

As a summary of the recovered memory movement and its shortcomings, this book is excellent. It falls down when the author attempts to explain why this strange phenomenon is happening now. He gives us possible reasons from urban malaise through ecological concerns and selfishness to pre-millenial tension. This laundry list of societal factors, which he says proves we are a "society in upheaval," sounds like the same list Democrats use to explain why there are Republicans, Republicans use to explain why there are Democrats, cops use to explain why there are criminals, and old folks use to explain why things were better in their day.

Of course, the most important thing about the recent plague of "recovered" memories is that we understand they are likely false and scrutinize them carefully. Victims of Memory should be useful in raising awareness on the subject, as it is powerful in both its logic and its emotional tone. If it cannot also answer its question, "why now?", well, neither can anyone else.

Rating:
Summary: Gripping, accessible, very informative, upsetting
Review: For the interviews with parents and former believers in recovered memory alone, this book is worth reading. It is long (about 600 pages) but there is little padding. I could not stop reading it, and found the authors' way of presenting their arguments very fair, despite the sensitive nature of the subject. They do not at all seek to minimise the importance of real abuse of children, but give ample evidence that psychotherapists and others are - sometimes with good intentions - abusing their positions to create a theory according to which even the most appaling abuse in childhood can be completely forgotten until the therapist recovers it, sometimes in horrendous ways. The authors don't believe it. Those who've been abused remember something, and don't need suggestions made to them. The best chapter is 'Why now?' which seeks to explain what seems like a contemporary form of witch hunting. I have always been very suspicious of arguments about memories being invented, but I can see, having read this book, how it can happen.

Rating:
Summary: Compassionate and sympathetic book about false memory.
Review: I found this book as I was beginning to question my own experiences trying to recover memories of sexual abuse with "Courage to Heal" and the even more irresponsible book "Repressed Memories." Using the exercises in CTH, I had sent myself into a downward spiral of self-absorption, self-pity, and depression that I didn't climb out of until I packed away my copy of CTH and walked away from my therapist.

It was only recently that I started to question whether my experiences had any basis whatsoever in some real trauma. I read "Victims of Memory," and what I found particularly striking was how much my experiences mirrored those of the "Retractors" -- men and women who had recovered memories, termed themselves "survivors," and then had finally realized that it was all a lie, the nightmares and terrifying images induced not by past trauma, but by irresponsible therapy and books like CTH.

While the other portions of the book were interesting -- Pendergrast's examination of the often-quoted study where various survivors found confirmation of their memories was particularly revealing -- I found the chapter of stories by retractors to be most compelling. This section helped me to realize that my experiences made sense: if you take an otherwise reasonably healthy adult or adolescent and have them focus twenty-four hours a day on their worst thoughts, their most negative feelings, their fears, their insecurities, etc., etc., etc. -- well, ANYONE will start having nightmares, panic attacks, etc. I didn't get better by "working through" the feelings described in CTH; I got better by getting out of therapy and getting on with my life.

I don't entirely exclude the possibility that people may repress (or simply forget) traumatic memories, and remember them later; however, I think advocates for Recovered Memory Therapy wildly overstate the number of people who do this. I wish that everyone who is pursuing the "memory recovery" techniques promoted by books like CTH would take the time just to read the chapter in this book about Retractors.

Rating:
Summary: Lacking in objectivity; also fails to address key issues
Review: This author's personal and highly emotional story lacks academic rigor and fails to address key issues regarding what we do know of cognitive science and basic physiological responses to trauma, all of which have been well documented repeatedly. If the author is indeed a victim of highly suggestible daughters and their highly unscrupulous therapists--something that cannot here be truly determined--he is part of the estimated 2% of that population. The much larger population of those with actual repressed traumatic memories, as well as perpetrators never called to account, is not responsibly addressed here. In the medical community, we know the scientific basis for natural human reactions to severe trauma, and we do not ignore the incontrovertible evidence that these phenomena exist. It does not further the interests of research, truth, or compassion to give fodder to exaggerated and reactionary (however understandable if the author has indeed been falsely accused)generalizations, as he does. The human mind is complex, this is not an either/or situation, and it is irresponsible to take one experience and create sweeping generalizations--and fallacies--from it.

Rating:
Summary: HELP out of Hell
Review: This book was real help to get out of the Hell my family has been in since falsely accused of abuse. The irresponisible therapists have NO idea the pain they have caused.

Rating:
Summary: Making sense of senseless cruelty
Review: Those so called "professionals" of the cottage industry called "childhood sexual abuse" should be forced to read this book before lunging foward to "save" more kids. The witch hunt we've seen in this nation makes Salem look like a tea party. Beautifully written, well researched, heartbreakingly fair - the enemies of critical thought and careful observation will hate this book.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliantly researched and heartfelt book
Review: Written by a father who saw his family ruined by recovered memories of abuse, this wonderful book tells the sad story of the recovered memory movement. The book is both exciting and horrifying as he tells his own true story and then carefully presents the evidence of the tragic development of the idea of recovered memories. This heartbreaking story has been repeated in too many families across the US.