Memory Adaptation to Psychological Trauma

This paper explores a way of coming to terms with a traumatic event by emphasizing its contrast with selected pretrauma memories. It has been recognized that memories may be reconstructed so that the trauma is shielded from awareness (as in screen memories), or blocked out totally (as in amnesia and denial), or selectively forgotten so that feelings of guilt, loss, or helplessness are less intense. In the following examples the trauma is openly acknowledged, but the retrieval of contrasting pretrauma memories becomes a search for evidence that one is not to blame.

Studies of severe life stress often reveal a guilty mulling over of the time before tragedy for mistakes and omissions that match a sense of personal responsibility for what has occurred.5 Because the guilt is exaggerated and because successful bereavement demands a restored self-esteem, it should be investigated whether there is a balancing use of pretrauma memories that lessens guilt. Consider the following case history examples.

Case 1. A 60-year-old chronic schizophrenic who had had multiple psychiatric hospitalizations had been seen in psychotherapy for two months when his 19-year-old son was killed in a motorcycle accident. Previous to this he had spoken of missing his family, feeling apart from them, and of not being an adequate father. In subsequent sessions over the next three weeks he responded matter-of-factly to questions about his sense of loss. He reminisced instead almost gaily about his military service in Belgium following World War II, demonstrating his knowledge of French cooking and the language. Sometimes he would break a long silence with a sudden reference to his dead son (“now I will have to build a dog house for my boy's Husky that lost his master”), but he would then return to a different topic with a resigned smile. One day he noticed my briefcase and remarked – “my boy had a case like that of brown leather, very handsome. It had a big gold buckle with the label surete and that's a