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In 2000 I was asked to review several books published at that time on the false/recovered memory debate. These books included Memory in Dispute edited by Valerie Sinason and published in 1998. Now over 20 years later, Sinason and her co-editor
Ashley Conway have updated the original, with new chapters by new authors alongside some of the original authors and chapters, bringing a current perspective to their original work. It somehow brings a certain symmetry that I find myself in the fortunate position of being asked to review this current book after over two decades of working in the trauma field and having set up a specialist service for historical (non-recent) child sexual abuse (HCSA). I am also writing this in the midst of co-chairing an Expert Reference Group at the Royal College of Psychiatrists on HCSA.
In my original review I described the recovered/false memory debate and the questions it raises about truth (or falsehood) and blame. I argued then that:
Perhaps the most difficult task in all of this is to begin to think about these kinds of questions in a way that recognises the need to have facts and information and yet to allow acknowledgement of the uncertainty that one is ultimately required to hold. It is a kind of paradox: becoming better informed about the memory debate and what it has to teach us confronts us with the need to move away from a polarised position of knowing (Stubley, 2000, p. 84).
Sinason and Conway say in their introduction, referring back to the first publication in 1998: ‘Since that time, some things have changed, and others sadly remain the same’ (p. 1). This is an important, indeed pivotal, issue for this book, which brings together chapters from psychoanalysts, psychologists, researchers and survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA). I personally found that the most notable change was that the intervening years have lent considerable depth and weight to the views expressed. No longer is this an attempt to present one side of a de