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In most respects, these are two very different books. Memories of Sexual Betrayal clearly reflects the current over-heated atmosphere enveloping the issue of recovered memories; The Recovery of Unconscious
Memories is a decidedly cooler account of laboratory research. Contributors to the former are all experienced clinicians, steeped in their work with survivors of sexual abuse. The author of the latter has no clinical credentials, but rather is a hard-headed experimental psychologist. The tone of the former is often rhetorical, disputatious, and somewhat more inclined toward theory than clinical detail; the tone of the latter, scholarly, critical, and more inclined toward experimental detail than memory theory. In one respect, however, they are kindred: both argue for the existence and accuracy of inaccessible memory that reappears in consciousness. Roughly speaking, Erdelyi's hypermnesia is the experimental counterpart to the clinician's recovered memory. Although it is not the authors but the editor of Psychoanalytic Books who has linked these books, the distinct possibility exists that the findings of the experimentalist can be used to support the beliefs, theories, and practices of the clinician. Since their natural audiences may not overlap, this may indeed prove to be a felicitous pairing.
Put together from papers and discussions at a similarly entitled 1995 conference, Memories of Sexual Betrayal is a spirited defense for the authenticity of therapeutically recovered memories of sexual trauma and an equally vigorous charge that critics of this view have agendas of their own. Although given in different voices, taken collectively the various entries argue that dissociation provides a way to understand how terrible events may fail to register in consciousness yet still be visible in different self-states as knowledge without awareness; that particular transference-counter-transference patterns and memory distortions offer valid evidence for unremembered abuse;