Remembering Trauma

Honorable Mention, Association of American Publishers 2003 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Award in PsychologyAre horrific experiences indelibly fixed in a victim's memory? Or does the mind protect itself by banishing traumatic memories from consciousness? How victims remember trauma is the most controversial issue in psychology today, spilling out of consulting rooms and laboratories to capture headlines, rupture families, provoke legislative change, and influence criminal trials and civil suits. This book, by a clinician who is also a laboratory researcher, is the first comprehensive, balanced analysis of the clinical and scientific evidence bearing on this issue-and the first to provide definitive answers to the urgent questions at the heart of the controversy."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."-Frederick Crews, New York Review of Books"Elegant and impassioned. [This book] makes a supposedly complex topic simple. Or at least simple enough to make readers wonder about the ready acceptance of a notion that goes against common sense and experience."-Debbie Nathan, Washington Post

Richard J. McNally is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University