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Brenneis's book is a timely and thoughtful contribution to the ongoing controversy regarding memories of sexual abuse. He intentionally keeps his focus on the appearance of previously unremembered trauma during the course of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis and takes a reasoned, serious approach to this vital matter. Adopting an attitude of “informed skepticism,” Brenneis surveys both the clinical and relevant research literature to arrive at his sobering conclusions that debunk many widely held beliefs.
Brenneis brings under careful scrutiny the “symptoms” that may lead the clinician to question the existence of unrecovered memories of trauma: traumatic dreams, dissociation, flashbacks, and repetitive behavioral enactments. In particular, he cautions against one-to-one correlations between dream elements, for example, and actual traumatic events in the past. To infer from the manifest content of a dream specific occurrences from the past is to ignore the complex processes of dream work in the symbolic transportation of events into dream images. Furthermore, Brenneis reminds us that repetitive dreams (and recurrent behavioral enactments) occur in a variety of clinical situations that are unrelated to unremembered memories of trauma. He also challenges the notion of a special form of memory for trauma, as advocated by van der Kolk, in which specific elements of past trauma are remembered in an undistorted manner. Brenneis reviews the cognitive research that shows little support for a special form of memory for trauma and also seriously questions whether any memory escapes distortion by the social context in which it is recalled.
This brings us to the heart of Brenneis's volume: the inquiry into whether reports of memories of trauma recovered during psychotherapy are actual or whether they are reactions to the clinician's technique. He does not deny the existence of recovered traumatic memories, but questions the therapeutic circumstances under which they are remembered