In the 1990s, repressed memories sparked a major scientific dispute about how trauma works. Now, the idea is back – with a twist.
Have you heard someone say online or in casual conversation, when responding to someone’s struggles, “well, the body keeps the score”?
The everyday use of this phrase also demonstrates the extraordinary reach of the 2014 non-fiction book that popularised it, The Body Keeps the Score by Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. But as the idea has spread, it’s also been simplified.
In fact, this book – which has spent almost six years on The New York Times bestseller list – goes beyond arguing that trauma affects the body. It rests on a far more contentious claim: that traumatic memories live in the body, inaccessible to conscious memory.
The core idea, rooted in psychoanalytic theory, was that traumatic experiences are so overwhelming that the mind unconsciously represses them as a defence mechanism, removing them from conscious awareness while they continue to produce psychological symptoms.
The Body Keeps the Score suggests healing requires “releasing” or “integrating” these hidden memories of trauma through a variety of alternative, often non-evidence-based therapies, such as yoga, pyschedelic-assisted therapy and guided imagery.
Decades of research show that autobiographical memory is reconstructed each time an event is recalled. This means the context we’re in – including new information, our emotions, and other people’s expectations – can influence what we remember. This may distort or alter our memories.
Suggestive therapy techniques – for example, hypnosis or guided imagery, where patients enter a highly suggestible state – are especially prone to implanting false memories.
From a memory perspective, psychedelics raise specific concerns. Research suggests psychedelics can affect memory in some worrying ways.
They make people more suggestible, meaning they are more likely to accept ideas or stories as true, even when they come from an outside source. They also create a powerful feeling that what people experience is deeply and certainly real.
[Ed: And maybe it is – but from a forensic perspective the use of psychedelics will be used to discredit recollections, rightly or wrongly.].
The author doesn’t appear to have read the book they are writing about!
I agree. Van der Kolk did not suggest these treatments lightly and is cognisant of the critique of these ideas. He has been a psychiatrist, researcher, and educator for over 50 years. I understand length of time does not equate to the validity of theory; he has produced relevant concepts, especially in the area of PTSD. The use of illicit drugs as a tool in psychoanalysis is still in the research phase, yet to be proven. False memories are entirely possible; however, scrutinising the ethics of the practitioner could be more revealing. Discounting him based on an unread book is somewhat akin to cancel culture.