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Despite its title, Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through Childhood Trauma: The Psychodynamics of Recovered Memories, Multiple Personality, Ritual
Abuse, Incest, Molest [sic], and Abduction by Lawrence E. Hedges has very little to do with childhood trauma or any of the other subjects in the subtitle. The book has mainly to do with Hedges' revisions of standard psychoanalytic theories of mental functioning and clinical practice, and with the elaboration of a set of concepts Hedges would like to see in their place (“the listening perspective,” “relatedness intelligence,” “the organizing transference,” etc.). Even though Hedges has specific chapter, and even whole section headings, that imply that the subjects listed in the title of the book will be covered, these issues are used to illustrate what he wants to say about psychoanalysis rather than to explore the topics psychoanalytically. The impression that the reader has been subjected to a “bait and switch” operation is almost unavoidable and this feeling of being deceived is further reinforced by Hedges' self-promotional tactics. Each time he presents one of his alternative theories, he indicates that it has been fully elaborated elsewhere and gives a standard series of references. When one goes to the bibliography one finds that none of the references has ever appeared in a referred journal, and that six out of the nine references have never ever been published (three items are listed as “in press,” and the others are cassette lectures distributed by the training institute he founded). Conceptually, Hedges may justify the book's focus, at least in his own mind, through the use of an odd intellectual sleight of hand, i.e., he makes no distinction between childhood trauma as we usually think of it and childhood as trauma. In other words he defines childhood itself as a form of cumulative strain trauma, making few if any distinctions between the average expectable frustrations and disappointments of childhood t