Therapy History

[writerkit]

I'm reading Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery, the book that first named complex PTSD and is still one of the seminal PTSD books. There are some interesting moments where, if you know what else was going in 1992, it becomes very obvious that she's trying to comment on both the satanic ritual abuse stuff and the memory wars without actually coming right out and commenting on either of them. She outright says at one point that therapists going "You have clearly suffered ritual abuse" based on a symptom list should not be doing that and implies that the "ritual abuse specialists" are practicing irresponsibly, but both of these are brief asides in a more detailed discussion about amnesia and recovered memory in PTSD. She also remonstrates the recovered-memory people a bit by pointing out that you really shouldn't need dramatics most of the time: talking about what the patient is currently feeling is usually enough to start memories surfacing on its own, and if after a lot of doing that there are still major memory gaps "judicious use of powerful techniques" may be warranted, and goes on to describe much calmer forms of hypnosis than the ones that got famous, with a heavy emphasis on leaving control in the hands of the patient. And I'm just looking at this like "Yeah, you were totally trying to be a voice of reason without actually saying that's what you were doing." (The book does show its age in this respect: while she's clear you shouldn't use anything on her last-resort list until the traditional approach has failed exhaustively, group therapy and hypnosis have fallen out of favor for that sort of thing these days and no one ethical is still using sodium amytal.)

This supports something else I read recently that was talking about memory gaps and the recovery thereof having been largely uncontroversial within war-based PTSD treatment and only got controversial when people started talking about child-abuse based trauma, which there was much less opportunity for external corroboration, since most of the war memories had a lot of other people present and military reports documenting them. Though I think it also has something to do with that being when the dramatic and unreliable methods of memory retrieval started getting popular. (As an aside, I don't remember which Elizabeth Loftus book I read, but I've read one of them-- one of the later ones, since she talked about experiences she'd had since getting famous. She didn't prove repressed memories don't exist; she proved false memories are possible. That gets lost a lot in discussing her work. As does her resigning from APA suspiciously close to an ethics complaint being brought, almost like someone tipped her off there was about to be an investigation.)

I like studying the history of psychology, and this is a neat example of putting pieces together through context clues in a book about something else: this is how the contemporary people talked about it.