Abstract
Taking her title and thematic metaphor from the biblical wife of Lot, Janice Haaken examines narratives of remembered sexual abuse and trauma. Lot's wife, unnamed by the patriarchal storytellers, was punished for looking back at the destruction of her home by being turned into a mound of salt. Because women are still punished for seeing clearly and speaking directly about their experiences of oppression under patriarchy, Haaken argues, story-telling is a vital means of expression. Haaken reframes narratives of sexual abuse and other therapeutic phenomena as stories that serve historically and socially situated functions.
Given the individualistic bent of American psychology, it is not easy to move the focus away from individual trauma and pathology to the larger social context of expressions of dis-ease. Haaken provides a wealth of historical analysis to broaden the context in which current controversies such as the recovered memory/false memory debate may be understood. The book's three sections are titled Frameworks for Looking Back: Gender, Memory and Social Pathology; Recovering Historical Memory: Sexual Storytelling, Hypnosis, and Hysteria; and Clinical Storytelling and Contemporary Social Dilemmas. The first section introduces approaches from cognitive, clinical, and psychoanalytic feminist psychology, critically examining their “blind spots.” For example, cognitive psychology has stumbled over how to encompass emotion in its study of memory. The second section explores a wide range of phenomena including folkloric legends of abuse, hypnosis, hysteria, multiple personality disorder, narratives of satanic ritual abuse, and, of course, recovered memories of sexual trauma. Haaken enlists a wide range of scholarship to build her case that women's stories do not have to be literally true to be socially and clinically profound.
We suspect that most readers who are scientifically trained psychologists will not want to hear this message. At present, the recovered-memory debate is framed as a dichotomy that can be resolved empirically. Either women's stories of uncovering memories of long-ago abuse are literally true or they are the products of suggestion. Proponents of the former view cite clinical and epidemiological evidence to buttress their claims about the prevalence of and harm caused by sexual transgressions against children. Proponents of the latter view cite laboratory studies that implant relatively trivial false memories as evidence that similar processes operate in therapy. The dichotomy of “true” and “false” memories, Haaken argues, does not do justice to the complexity of how human memory works—a complexity that encompasses symbolic, narrative, reconstructive, and transformative aspects. However, this true/false dichotomy is exactly the one that many clinicians and researchers seek to resolve. They will look in vain for such an easy resolution in this book. Instead, Haaken does full justice to the complexity of remembering, especially for women, who are still denied symbolic and narrative recognition of their experiences. For example, in analyzing the value of the construct of “survivorship,” Haaken notes that
[o]nce sexual survivorship moves from the realm of the particular abuses of women to that of legendary truth, it speaks to a broad set of female grievances. The incest survivor stands for every woman's seductions under patriarchy, for the myriad, daily violations of her sense of self, and for the estrangement so many women experience from their own bodies. … (the message of survivorship) is moving to many women because it affirms the depths of female grievances. In an era when child sexual abuse has come to represent the violation of the self at the deepest level, this same imagery may be employed to objectify a pervasive sense of anguish (pp. 180–181).
Most everyday memories, of course, do refer in useful ways to actual events and objects in the external world. The trouble is that the reference is not literal. Memory does not work like a photograph or a CD. Memory is reconstructive. Each time a memory is recalled it is rewoven out of materials that are inconstant and changeable, filtered through our original understanding of the event, our memory of subsequent retellings (both our own and others'), and shaped by our background beliefs, assumptions, and expectations. Laboratory research has taught us that memories are fragile traces of our past, at least as fragile as any of the physical traces that we value so highly in reconstructing events at a crime scene, such as fingerprints or microscopic fibers.
It is the social consequences of the mutability of memory that Haaken seeks to understand. This understanding of memories as shaped by expectations, context, and retellings gives a large role to social interaction as events are understood and then told and retold as stories. For most everyday purposes the veridicality of a memory is less important than the sense of community accomplished by sharing a story. So what if our memories of childhood are a pastiche of stories we have told, and stories our family, friends and neighbors have told to us and of us? The act of telling renews social ties, creating and maintaining our network of relationships with family and community. The fragility of memory can be seen as an important part of this process, providing a reason for the constant telling and retelling. This year I tell my story. Next year, I have forgotten it, and you tell it back to me. Then whose story is it? Mostly, it does not matter, unless it is a memory with a socially significant meaning or consequence. Then the fact that memories are not simply a veridical record of events becomes important because, in the process of connecting with others, our memories may be shaped to fit the needs, hopes, or expectations of those others.
Sometimes memories of abuse and trauma remain untold, are reframed and minimized, or are forgotten. At other times, memories may be created for events that never happened, bringing meaning to some perhaps and dismay or outrage to others.
Haaken suggests that when there is a cultural climate of controversy over memory and meaning, we need to ask larger questions than whether a particular memory is true or false. Sometimes that question can be answered, sometimes not. In either case, it is important to understand the role the story plays in the social life of the group and how the group relates to the larger social fabric. Memories are not simply private possessions, but a product of social processes and structures which they help to build and cement. A better understanding of memory as a psychic, social, and cultural process can help us avoid making naïve mistakes both about our own memories and those of others.
Graduate students in clinical, cognitive, and social psychology, as well as practicing clinicians, memory theorists, and feminist theorists, could all learn from this book. Unfortunately, the reader's task is made more difficult by the book's uninviting design: small print, tiny margins giving a crowded look to the page, minimal white space around headings, and a complete lack of graphic enhancement. The book is tiring to read, and not just because of its complex content and dense prose style. The author deserved better from her publisher and editor. Nevertheless, Haaken's determination not to oversimplify the “perils of looking back” makes this book a fine contribution to feminist scholarship.