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The nature and reliability of traumatic memories have been controversial issues in psychiatry for over a century. Traumatic memories are difficult to study, since the profoundly upsetting emotional experiences that may give rise to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other trauma related outcomes cannot be approximated in a laboratory setting. For example, even viewing a movie depicting actual executions failed to precipitate post-traumatic symptoms in normal college students (Pitman, personal communication, 1994). If trauma is defined as the experience of an inescapable stressful event that overwhelms one's existing coping mechanisms, it is questionable whether findings of memory distortions in normal subjects exposed to videotaped stresses in the laboratory can serve as meaningful guides to understanding traumatic memories. Clearly, there is little similarity between viewing a simulated car accident on a TV screen, and being the responsible driver in a car crash in which one's own children are killed. While stress evokes homeostatic mechanisms that lead to self-conservation and resource-re-allocation (e.g. Selye 1956), PTSD involves a unique combination of learned conditioning, problems modulating arousal, and shattered meaning propositions. Shalev (1995) has proposed that this complexity is best understood as the co-occurrence of several interlocking pathogenic processes including (a) an alteration of neurobiological processes affecting stimulus discrimination (expressed as increased arousal and decreased attention), (b) the acquisition of conditioned fear responses to trauma-related stimuli, and (c) altered cognitive schemata and social apprehension.
Without the option of inflicting actual trauma in the laboratory, there are limited options for the exploration of traumatic memories. These include collecting retrospective reports from traumatized individuals, post-hoc observations, and provoking, then studying, traumatic memories and flashbacks in people wit