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Fact or fantasy? A review of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2014

Michael M DelMonte
Michael M DelMonte*
Affiliation:
St Patrick's Hospital, Dublin 8, Ireland
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Abstract

More than a century ago Freud provoked a bitter controversy concerning alleged recollections of childhood sexual abuse: Were they fact or fiction? This debate is still ongoing, with some professionals stubbornly holding on to deeply entrenched and polarised positions. On the one side there are those who continue to deny the veracity of all ‘recovered memories’, and thus also of the implicated psychological defenses of repression and dissociation. At the other extreme are those therapists who simplistically assume that particular symptoms invariably imply sexual abuse. Over the decades there is a growing corpus of anecdotal, clinical and, more recently, research evidence supporting the contention that childhood sexual abuse, like all other trauma, can be forgotten for days, and even for many years, before being recalled. However, the reconstruction of these memories is a complex and, at times, a rather fallible process.

Keywords

Sexual abuseRecovered memoryDissociationRepressionFalce memory syndrome
Type
Reviews
Information
Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , September 2001 , pp. 99 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2001

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