Article summary of Recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse by McNally - Chapter

Which two perspectives exist with regards to recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse?

There is much controversy regarding repressed and recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and two interpretations can be identified, namely the repression perspective and the false memory perspective. 

What is the repression perspective?

According to the repression perspective, the mind protects itself by banishing memories of abuse from conscious awareness because they are so traumatic. Victims don’t become capable of recalling them until it becomes emotionally safe to do so, which is often after many years. These repressed memories can cause emotional consequences. Therapists should foster healing by helping patients recover their repressed CSA memories that are causing them emotional difficulties. They consider traumatic dissociative amnesia to be different from normal forgetting, as it involves strong affect and is resistant to retrieval through salient cues. They recommend guided imagery, hypnosis, and dream interpretation. 

What is the false memory perspective?

According to the false memory perspective, traumatic memories are not exempt from the principles that regulate the encoding and recall of other emotional memories. They believe that stress hormones released during the traumatic event should enhance its memorability. If a person remembers a traumatic experience which they say not to have remembered before, it is considered to be a false memory, an inadvertent confabulation that occurs when someone confuses an imagined event with a real one. 

What is meant with the term ‘Memory Wars’?

The term ‘Memory Wars’ refers to the dispute between these two perspectives. The central issue is whether people can become incapable of recalling encoded memories of trauma, and a second issue is whether people can recall these inaccessible memories if the circumstances are favorable. The problem for the false memory perspective is that scientifically it is not possible to prove that something does not exist, they can only say that there is no convincing evidence for it. 

What are the common confusions that occur in scientific literature with regards to trauma and memory?

• Post-traumatic forgetfulness versus an inability to remember the trauma. One symptom of post-traumatic forgetfulness is having memory difficulties in everyday life, but not an inability to recall the trauma. It is the intrusive recall of the trauma that may interfere with one’s ability to remember things in daily life. 

• Impaired encoding of trauma versus amnesia for trauma. The inability to remember an important component of a trauma is not necessarily caused by an inability to remember an encoded message, if not by the possibility that the information was never encoded in the first place. Emotional arousal causes attention to narrow to the central features of the experiences and not the peripheral ones. E.g. “weapon focus”: remembering details of the weapon that was aimed at you, but not the face of the gunman. This is an example of encoding failure, not retrieval failure. 

• Psychogenic amnesia versus repression of trauma. Some theorists say that psychogenic amnesia is related to the recovery of presumably repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. Psychogenic amnesia is a rare syndrome whereby a person reports a sudden, massive retrograde memory loss, including a loss of his/her identity, without any organic precipitant. However, there are three differences with regards to the repression of trauma: 1) the person’s memory loss is global and not specific to a stressful event, 2) autobiographical memory loss, and 3) antecedents to the memory loss are seldom traumatic. 

• Organic amnesia versus repression of trauma. Some theorists have mistaken cases of memory loss resulting from a physical cause to the brain with psychic repression of trauma. 

• Non disclosure versus repression of trauma. A reluctance to talk about a traumatic event should not be equated with an inability to remember it. 

• Childhood amnesia versus repression of trauma. Neurocognitive capacities that support autobiographical memory develop slowly and people remember few experiences before the age of 4 or 5. A failure to recall childhood sexual abuse before that age is caused by normal childhood amnesia, not by repression. 

• Not thinking about abuse versus repression of trauma. A traumatic experience can not come to mind for many years, but that does not indicate a lack of memory of it. Not thinking about the trauma is not the same as being unable to remember it - repression requires the inability to recall the trauma despite the presence of reminders. 

What are the results of psychometric and clinical studies with regards to recovered memories of CSA?

• With regards to continuous memory participants and nonabused participants, research showed that continuous memory participants scored equally on stress, depression, dissociation, negative affectivity, and positive affectivity as nonabused comparison participants. However, the continuous memory participants were recruited from counseling groups and it is possible they have already relieved most of their symptoms. 

• With regards to repressed memory participants and continuous memory participants, research showed that repressed memory participants scored higher than continuous memory participants on measures of stress, depression, dissociation, and negative affectivity (but not positive affectivity). There are two possible explanations for this outcome. The first being that repressed memory participants suffer the psychological toll of having buried their memories. A second explanation is that they infer that they have repressed memories to make sense of their feelings of distress. They find benefits from recalling their memories of abuse, by increased self-esteem and increased self-understanding. 

What are the results of laboratory studies of recovered memories?

What is Lenore Terr’s repressed memory theory?

Psychiatrist Lenore Terr suggested that sexually abused children cope by acquiring a dissociative, avoidant encoding style that enables them to disengage attention during episodes of abuse and direct their attention elsewhere. Dissociative encoding during these episodes may explain amnesia for the abuse later in life. Her theory is most relevant to people who say they have forgotten their abuse or that are incapable of remembering it (meaning results with regards to sufferers of PTSD are not relevant). 

What is the paradox in her theory? 

The theory may explain why a victim may be incapable of recalling the abuse, but it doesn’t explain why a victim would recall it later in life. If the sexually abused children dissociate their attention during the abuse and block their encoding of the abuse, they will be unable to recall the abuse later in life, because the memories were never encoded. This means that retrieval inhibition is most relevant to the forgetting of childhood sexual abuse, not dissociative encoding. Alleged amnesia presupposes that a victim has encoded the experience, but is unable to retrieve it because of defense mechanisms of the mind.

What can be concluded from McNally’s experiment with regards to memories of CSA?

The results from this research do not confirm above mentioned theories. The results showed that all groups more often recalled specific memories from adulthood than from childhood. The repressed memory group recalled fewer specific memories than the nonabused comparison group, and the recovered and continuous memory groups fell between them. The findings are consistent with two conflicting interpretations. Repression theorists would say that poor overall memory for one’s childhood may signify that a person has dissociated memories of trauma. On the other hand, psychologically troubled individuals may interpret fuzzy childhood memories as signifying the presence of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse as a means of explaining both their psychological symptoms and their poor memory. 

What are the results of laboratory studies with regards to false memories?

One research showed that members of the comparison group were twice as likely as the recovered memory group to exhibit heightened confidence that events they had envisioned during guided imagery had occurred relative to events that they had not envisioned. However, some of the recovered memory participants seemed to know the purpose of the research, namely whether they would develop false memories about childhood in the laboratory. 

What is reality monitoring?

Reality monitoring is the ability to distinguish reality from fantasy, reality being memories that arose from perception and fantasy being memories that arose from imagination. Recovered memory participants reported deficits in that distinguishment. 

What clinical recommendations can be given?

No convincing evidence has been produced that people may become incapable of recalling terrifying, encoded memories of trauma that they are later able to recall during hypnosis or guided imagery. However, there is evidence that such procedures can foster imagery that patients can mistake for memories of genuine trauma. Psychotherapists should refrain from using methods to unlock presumably buried memories of abuse if the patient denies such a history, and the symptoms should be treated directly. 

What are the limitations of the research?

The participants in the research all volunteered, which makes it difficult to tell how they may differ from abuse victims who decline to participate in the research. Also, the participants knew that the research was about childhood sexual abuse, which may have affected their task performance. 

What third perspective should be considered with regards to memories of CSA? 

Research indicates support for the false memory perspective, but not for the repressed memory perspective. A third perspective may however account for many cases that are mistakenly construed as recovery or previously repressed. This perspective shows that people may forget and recall episodes of childhood sexual abuse, without memories of these experiences having been repressed or dissociated, as they were not encoded as being traumatic when they occured.