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In Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through Childhood Trauma, Lawrence Hedges takes an interesting position on the question of recovered memory: while clearly skeptical regarding the literal truth of recovered childhood memories of early trauma, he nonetheless appears to regard them as representing an earlier, infantile historical truth. The book is divided into four sections, which provide clinical and theoretical commentary on forms of memory, multiple personality, the dual relationship in psychotherapy, and an infantile “organizing experience” and its therapeutic manifestations.
Part I, “Taking Recovered Memories Seriously,” introduces a conceptual hierarchy of forgetting and remembering. Loosely borrowing from diverse psychoanalytic theories, Hedges establishes a series of pairs arranged in developmental sequence: (1) at the oedipal stage, forgetting as “secondary repression” and remembering as discrete “recollections”; (2) at the narcissistic stage, “dissociation” and “realizations”; (3) at the symbiotic stage, “ego-affect splitting” and “representations”; and (4) at