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Ultimately, historians will have the last word. After the air clears in the decidedly civil war, for the most part between research and clinical psychology, historians will tell us what else it was about—aside from a pitched battle over the legitimacy of various types of evidence and the authenticity of therapeutically recovered memories of childhood trauma. For now, however, the only views available are from the midst of conflict, and much is uncertain and rapidly changing. For example, it is altogether unclear, among clinicians, how many generally accept the validity of these memories and seriously doubt the risks of suggestion in their recovery. It is extremely hard to tell whether the clinicians writing the APA Final Report (Alpert, Brown, & Courtois, 1996) speak for many of us, most of us, or only a few of us. In addition, it appears as if the terms of the dispute may have inverted, and dramatically so, within the past year. As recently as early 1997, a number of prominent analytic clinicians announced their belief that no evidence exists to demonstrate conclusively that memories of childhood abuse can be fabricated or implanted (Davies, 1996; Fonagy, 1997). The closely reasoned chapters of Recovered Memories and False Memories indicate, however, that most of the evidence now stands on the other side and what needs to be proven is not that such memories may be false but that they may be true. Of course where one stands in relation to the “memory wars” determines what one sees, and the decisiveness of this shift may be more a function of my perspective than of territory actually won or lost.
Recovered Memories and False Memories can be thought of as one part text on contemporary cognitive science views of memory, and one part