Dr Bessel van der Kolk, a specialist in trauma and memory retrieval, has postulated that dissociated memories have four different phenomena occurring: the sensory and emotional fragmentation of the experience; the feeling of depersonalization during the experience (feeling "unreal" or "far away" from the event); ongoing depersonalization (spacing out in daily life), and finally, containing the traumatic material within fragmented ego states (dissociative disorder). He also notes that not all individuals who undergo trauma will develop chronic dissociation in response, and that individual responses will vary greatly.
Professor Ross Cheit at Brown University certainly believes in the validity of recovered memory, and at his web site www.brown.edu/Departments/Taubman_Center/Recovmem/Archive.html The Recovered Memory Project, he includes archives of 80 cases of corroborated recovery memories. Many of these cases have evidence such as the guilty party ADMITTING to having sexually abused or otherwise victimized others who recovered memories later in life.
What about those who retract their stories? This has been used and reused in the media to show that recovered memories must be "false". But in an interesting study by Gonzalez, Waterman, et al at UCLA (1993), it was shown that that retracting did NOT prove that the abuse hadn't occurred. They studied a group of preschool children in which the children were absolutely confirmed and documented victims of sexual abuse. The perpetrator had confessed, and their was substantial physical evidence as well. In 25 % of these cases, the children later RECANTED their allegations, although 2/3 of these later redisclosed again. The researchers postulated that the recanting may have been a method of attempting to numb or escape from the psychological pain caused by acknowledging the trauma. This was in the context of support, loving parents, and caring concern. How much more difficult it can be for an adult survivor, who often faces familial hostility, denial, or shunning, to not want at times to swing into denial or recant allegations? The fact that recanting occurs does not invalidate the recovered memories, though, according to research.
Memory retrieval is a complex subject, and studies are still ongoing. But on one thing, the jury is in and decided: retrieved memories of abuse can be believed. The evidence, based on objective studies, over and over verifies this fact.
Resources: 1) Elliot, D.M. (1997)Traumatic Events: Prevalence and delayed recall in the General Population) and published in the Journal of Clinical and Consulting Psychiatry , 65, 811-820. 2)Herman, J. L., & Schatzow, E. (1987). Recovery and verification of memories of childhood sexual trauma. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 4, 1-14.
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