Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through Childhood Trauma: The Psychodynamics of Recovered Memories, Multiple Personality, Ritual Abuse, Incest, Molestation, and Abduction. Hedges, Lawrence. Northvale, New Jersey:  Jason Aronson, Inc., 1994,  336 pages, $40.00.

The subject of treating adults who were victims of childhood trauma, sexual abuse, and/or incest is currently in the forefront of concern. Questions about the veracity of memories recovered during treatment are, at times, inflammatory. Not since the Freud-Ferenczi controversy over actual trauma versus infantile fantasy has there been such a furor. This same issue sparks considerable debate today, polarizing both the therapeutic community and society at large. This debate has been sensationalized in the media and has found its way into the courts, involving patients, their families, and their therapists. This maelstrom has resulted in a flood of clinical publications. This book incorporates Freudian, Object-Relational and Kohutian perspectives on this topic.

Hedges' stated goals are fourfold: first, to explore the phenomenon of recovered memories through a review of repression and transference; second, to focus on multiple personality, because he believes mat abuse is widely implicated in its etiology; third, to consider the “dual relationship” in the treatment context, which he views as the chief cause of ethical charges and lawsuits leveled against therapists;