Volume 51, Number 4 · March 11, 2004
The Trauma Trap
By Frederick C. Crews
Remembering Trauma
by Richard J. McNally
Belknap/Harvard University Press, 420 pp., $35
Memory, Trauma Treatment, and the Law
by Daniel Brown, Alan W. Scheflin, and D. Corydon Hammond
W. W. Norton, 768 pp., $100.00
Every now and then a book appears that can be instantly recognized as essential for its field--a work that must become standard reading if that field is to be purged of needless confusion and fortified against future errors of the same general kind. Such a book is Remembering Trauma, by the Harvard psychology professor Richard J. McNally. To be sure, the author's intention is not revolutionary but only consolidating; he wants to show what has already been learned, through well-designed experiments and analyses of records, about the effects that psychological trauma typically exerts on our memory. But what has been learned is not what is widely believed, and McNally is obliged to clear away a heap of junk theory. In doing so, he provides a brilliant object lesson in the exercise of rational standards that are common to every science deserving of the name.
Review, 6096 words
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