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Retrieved memories of childhood sexual abuse
Author(s) -
Delmonte Michael M.
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
british journal of medical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.102
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 2044-8341
pISSN - 0007-1129
DOI - 10.1348/000711200160246
Subject(s) - psychology , sexual abuse , poison control , suicide prevention , injury prevention , human factors and ergonomics , child abuse , occupational safety and health , developmental psychology , medical emergency , psychoanalysis , psychiatry , medicine , pathology
About a century ago Freud sparked off a bitter controversy concerning alleged recollections of childhood sexual abuse: Were they fact or fiction? Recently this debate has been revived with intensity, with some professionals stubbornly taking up entrenched and polarized 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 defences of repression and dissociation. At the other extreme are those therapists who assume that particular symptoms invariably imply sexual abuse. 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 somewhat fallible process.