Maintains that there is no controlled scientific evidence that memories of trauma may be "recovered" years later.

Buried memories of sexual abuse can have a devastating impact on a victim's relationships, work, and health. Using case histories, Renee Fredrickson stresses the importance of recovering these memories as a crucial step in healing, and she explains various therapeutic processes used in memory retrieval.

Decipher the complex interplay of neurology, psychology, trauma, and memory! In the midst of the controversies over how repressed, false, and recovered memories should be interpreted, Trauma and Cognitive Science presents reliable original research instead of rhetoric. This landmark volume examines the way different traumas influence memory, information processing, and suggestibility. The research provides testable theories on why people forget some kinds of childhood abuse and other traumas. It bridges the cognitive science and clinical approaches to traumatic stress studies. Written by the foremost researchers in the field, including Bessel van der Kolk and Jennifer Freyd, these scientific evaluations of the way traumatic memories are processed offer powerful new perspectives on the interplay of biology and psychology. Trauma and Cognitive Science discusses a range of traumas, including combat, child abuse, and sexual assault across the lifespan. Fascinating perceptual experiments shed light on the cognitive uses of dissociation, the encoding and recall of memory, and the effects of early trauma on subsequent information processing. Trauma and Cognitive Science offers solid information on the most challenging questions in this field: How is memory encoded, stored, and retrieved? How is it forgotten? How does trauma influence these processes? What kinds of memories can be created by suggestion? What physical changes take place in the brain under traumatic stress? How is consciousness disturbed during and after trauma? What are the ethical, clinical, and societal implications of traumatic stress studies? How can people suffering from traumatic memories be healed? Trauma and Cognitive Science also offers an astonishing array of true case studies, including the story of an adult woman who was raped, went to court, and saw her rapist convicted--and then forgot the whole traumatic episode. The independently corroborated accounts of recovered memories and the carefully designed research studies on multiple modes and levels of memory may offer the key to understanding how we remember and why we forget. The results of these controlled scientific studies have wide-ranging implications for abuse survivors, combat veterans, rape victims, and people who have survived traumatic events from earthquakes to car accidents. Written in clear, accessible prose, Trauma and Cognitive Science belongs on the bookshelf of all mental health professionals, researchers in the areas of traumatic stress and child abuse, attorneys, judges, and survivors of abuse and trauma.

The question of whether memories can be lost, particularly as a result of trauma, and then "recovered" through psychotherapy has polarised the field of memory research. This is the first volume to bring together leading memory researchers and clinicians with the aiming of facilitating aresolution to this question. The volume offers a unique and timely summary of the theories of memory recovery, and how false memories may be created. Some of the first research relating to the phenomenal characteristics of memory recovered is reported in detail, suggesting important avenues fornew research. Theories of autobiographical memory, implicit memory, reminiscence, and the effects of repeated recall on memory are included. Recovered memories and false memories provides the most current and authoritative thinking in this area, and will be an essential sourcebook for memoryresearchers and psychotherapists.

[This book addresses] special topic areas relevant to therapists and expert witnesses responding to reports of delayed memories of childhood sex abuse. The idea behind each chapter is to identify significant concerns, suggest questions that might help clinical and forensic practitioners approach those concerns, and present examples of research findings, hypotheses, and interventions relevant to the concerns.

Beginning in the 1990s, the contentious “memory wars” divided psychologists into two schools of thought: that adults’ recovered memories of childhood abuse were generally true, or that they were generally not, calling theories, therapies, professional ethics, and survivor credibility into question. More recently, findings from cognitive psychology and neuroimaging as well as new theoretical constructs are bringing balance, if not reconciliation, to this polarizing debate. Based on presentations at the 2010 Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, True and False Recovered Memories: Toward a Reconciliation of the Debate assembles an expert panel of scholars, professors, and clinicians to update and expand research and knowledge about the complex interaction of cognitive, emotional, and motivational factors involved in remembering—and forgetting—severe childhood trauma. Contrasting viewpoints, elaborations on existing ideas, challenges to accepted models, and intriguing experimental data shed light on such issues as the intricacies of identity construction in memory, post-trauma brain development, and the role of suggestive therapeutic techniques in creating false memories. Taken together, these papers add significant new dimensions to a rapidly evolving field. Featured in the coverage: The cognitive neuroscience of true and false memories. Toward a cognitive-neurobiological model of motivated forgetting. The search for repressed memory. A theoretical framework for understanding recovered memory experiences. Cognitive underpinnings of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Motivated forgetting and misremembering: perspectives from betrayal trauma theory. Clinical and cognitive psychologists on all sides of the debate will welcome True and False Recovered Memories as a trustworthy reference, an impartial guide to ongoing controversies, and a springboard for future inquiry.