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In the 1980s, the social debate over child sexual abuse and its effects, particularly for women, escalated in the form of a debate over what came to be called “recovered memory.” Many adults came to understand themselves as survivors of childhood sexual abuse, and although they did not have continuous memories of early abuse, they relied upon recovered memory to reconstruct past events. For those elders who now stand accused of sexual crimes against children, faith in recovered memory is misplaced; for them, a biased therapeutic establishment encourages the fabrication of “false memory.” In Pillar of Salt, Janice Haaken, a professor of psychology and clinical psychologist in private practice, intervenes in this highly charged debate. Refusing to take sides, she examines the debate itself, including its psychological, cultural, and historical dimensions. The results of her study are unlikely to comfort those who have taken up opposing positions, but they do throw considerable light on the issues for those who remain on the sidelines.
Haaken begins by examining women's vexed relationships to memory and remembering, framing the analysis around the biblical story of Lot's wife. The nameless woman, turned by God into a pillar of salt for looking back on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, is punished more mercilessly than the husband who attempts to barter their daughters to appease a sexual mob. What is so threatening, Haaken asks, about women “looking back”—acting as the purveyors of memory, especially memories of patriarchal abuses? In responding to that question, Haaken addresses both feminist attempts to reify women's recovered narratives of abuse as unimpeachable truth and false memory critics' attempts to impeach women's narratives of intrusion, harm, loss, and voicelessness. Her exploration takes her into topics that are the stuff of scholarship as well as headlines: hysteria, posttraumatic stress disorder, multiple personality disorder, spiritualism, and charg