In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Biography 23.3 (2000) 542-546



[Access article in PDF]
Janice Haaken. Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back. Piscataway: Rutgers UP, 1998. 275 pp. ISBN 0-8135-2837-2, $22.00.

Pillar of Salt offers a scholarly analysis of women's recovered memories of sexual abuse. Early in the book, Janice Haaken reveals that such reconstructed accounts are a relatively new phenomenon. Indeed, as she notes, [End Page 542] before the 1980s women and men who had been maltreated as children did not turn to therapy to recall and overcome their early miseries. The shame was too great. Many feared to name their attackers. Nonetheless, memories festered poisonously in their often ruined lives. After therapy became more acceptable, the situation, Haaken continues, was somewhat reversed. The fearful began to speak up. Accusations of male sexual abuse multiplied. For example, news that some priests in parochial schools or in churches had assaulted young children encouraged others to add their stories in a crescendo of revelation. Haaken reports an episode in which the initial charge of sexual assault was "corroborated by about fifty other men and women" (24). Then in the late 1980s, Haaken reports, during therapy sessions women began retrieving previously repressed memories of abuse. Children of both sexes in day care were also encouraged by doll therapy to denounce caretakers for taking an undue interest in their bodies. "Recovered memory" became the phenomenon of the decade.

Haaken, a professor of psychology and a clinical psychologist in private practice, asks a key question in the first chapter of her study. "Why, for example, do so many of the memories women are recovering involve sexual abuse?" "And," she continues, "why do so many therapists now speak more about trauma and dissociation, and less of internal conflict, in framing emotional problems, particularly those of women?" (4). Nothing in contemporary behavior suggests that women, or men for that matter, are no longer subject to internal conflict. As a result, Haaken's queries hint that she is a skeptical reader of some of these stories.

How does a reasonable person assess such claims? To be sure, narratives of parental or familial sexual abuse are wrenching and compelling. We are tempted to believe the stories we hear. Unlike Freud, who came to believe that most of his patients were fantasizing, some psychotherapists specialize in patients with multiple personalities and recovered memories. Other observers, more cynical perhaps, regard these accounts as being in the same category with tales of alien abduction. Haaken's key questions reveal a degree of skepticism, but only a degree. She studiously avoids making premature judgments. This tactic can be frustrating for readers who want guidelines for evaluating such assertions. Instead of speculating, however, she reviews the important literature on both sides of the subject, and takes a mediating position. These stories, she asserts, reveal a great deal about our culture and the lives of women. Those with the patience to read her often densely written prose will learn much about the background of this topic.

To enhance our understanding of this complex phenomenon, Haaken draws upon her clinical experience to offer what she regards as a model of reasonable reaction to a story of abuse. At the end of her study she presents [End Page 543] a brief case history. Lan, a troubled Vietnamese woman, eventually recalled an episode in which her older brother had "fondled and undressed" her (260). Doctor and patient explored her reactions to this event. In time, Lan remembered an episode with her younger brother, which "she had never spoken about and barely thought about." She had, Haaken continues, stimulated "her young brother's genitals," and once "put his penis inside her to 'see what it felt like.'" As therapist, Haaken helped the patient place this memory in the context of her older brother's act. Wisely, though, Haaken warns against too easy "redemptive interpretations." The urge to reassure a patient can be, Haaken asserts, "based on the therapist's own fear of some disturbing part of the patient, a retreat from the experience...

pdf