At first, I was confused that two world experts could disagree about something as fundamental as whether we can forget bad memories. But as it turned out, I’d inadvertently stumbled upon one of the deepest tensions in psychology. This abiding rift over memory stems in part from a controversy in the field that took place three decades ago.
In 1990, a university student called Holly Ramona started therapy for her depression and bulimia. Her therapist, Marche Isabella, told Holly and her mother that bulimia was usually caused by incest, and that 70% of her bulimia patients had been sexually abused as children. Through the course of therapy, Isabella worked with Holly until she seemed to uncover memories of being sexually abused by her father. Her father vehemently denied this, but would go on to lose his job, his marriage, and his family. He became the first person to successfully sue a therapist over implanted memories.
There were hundreds of similar cases involving “recovered memories” of childhood sexual abuse in the Eighties and Nineties, with therapists pushing their patients towards memories they didn’t have. It is a complicated moment in the history of psychology, because childhood sexual abuse is devastating and disturbingly common, and cases of false memories need to be carefully parsed out from real recollections. Some studies have also shown that traumatised people are more likely to have false memories, and Elizabeth Loftus, arguably the most influential researcher in this area, has shown convincingly how suggestible we can be to forming new memories. And even though there was no scientific support for the approach, a cohort of therapists were convinced that memories of abuse could only be unlocked through treatment. But many patients would later recant their “recovered memories”, and a host of lawsuits followed. For more medicalised psychologists, this episode was proof that psychoanalysis was vague, unscientific hokum.
This had lasting consequences for the field of psychology, leaving practitioners stuck between two reductionist positions: that either traumatic memories are entirely real, or that they are entirely manufactured. Neither position seems convincing when we consider the complexity of the mind and the prevalence of childhood abuse. But it partly explains why Bonanno and van der Kolk are at such odds.
It feels like clinicians such as van der Kolk are making the same mistakes as their Eighties predecessors as they encourage millions of people to “find their trauma”. While there are benefits to destigmatising trauma, there are dangers too. Rachel Yehuda, Director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, cautions that “if you attribute everything that happens in the world that you don’t like or that you didn’t expect [to trauma]… that can take a concept that could have been very useful and change it quite drastically”.
Just look at the rise of “trigger warnings”. A 2020 study on trauma survivors found that these warnings may in fact worsen anxiety by increasing the “narrative centrality” of trauma among survivors. “Narrative centrality” refers to the degree to which someone identifies with their trauma, and how central it is in how they understand their own life. By increasing narrative centrality, you risk keeping people stuck in their trauma.
This points to the double-edged sword of increased cultural awareness of trauma. On one edge, it opens up more honest and vulnerable conversations about emotional suffering and mental health. On the other, it increases the narrative centrality of trauma throughout society.
As a result, therapists and psychologists are filling the role left by the clergy in providing guidance for how to live. As the Memory Wars show, psychoanalysis has the right DNA to fill that void. It is mystical, insofar as it deals with the unseen realms beyond our awareness. It is confessional. It is revelatory, revealing to us why we do what we do. In the absence of a metaphysical framework that can help us understand why we suffer, trauma is becoming a creed that can explain all.
And if the rise of therapy-speak is frustrating, it is also understandable. We need some way to make sense of suffering and redemption. It’s a problem, though, when we focus too much on our fragility and forget our resilience, a critique often levelled at progressives by conservatives. Likewise, if we ignore our vulnerability entirely, we create repressive societies — as liberals are fond of pointing out.
With its focus on emotional safety and the deterministic qualities of trauma, psychology often coincides neatly with social justice ideologies. Yet what works in the therapy room doesn’t necessarily work in the real world. Take the example of emotional validation: the idea of a therapist acknowledging and connecting with the emotional reality of a client. When this becomes a value in society, we can quickly fall into a moral relativism that gives undue value to people’s emotional reality.
But a healthy society should be sophisticated enough to know that humans are both fragile and resilient at different times and in different contexts. A healthy perspective requires us taking our “emotional reality” with a pinch of salt. Knowing when to focus on trauma and when to let it go requires a kind of wisdom that we won’t find on social media feeds and university safe spaces — but in the grit and contradiction of the human experience.
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