Memory Quest: Trauma and the Search for Personal History Hardback - 1996

How is memory formed, reformed, modified in the telling, lost and found? How does it contribute to our sense of self? How are both memory and the self affected by trauma and subsequent distortions and evasion? And how can the past be brought into the present safely and productively? Merging memory research and clinical experience, this book explores these questions and many more that are encountered in a quest for personal memory. Ever the thoughtful guide, Waites shows her readers how memory and one's sense of self are inextricably joined. The search for autobiographical memory becomes a search for the authentic voice of the self, a voice often drowned out by competing narratives, contradicted by cover stories, and silenced by intimidation. Waites focuses on the impact of trauma on several levels of information-processing and memory organization, showing how memory "goes haywire" in posttraumatic stress disorder. Controversies around memory, such as the issue of so-called "recovered memories" of abuse, are considered within a broad context that recognizes that accuracy of such memories is not an absolute. Memory is a dynamic, adaptive, and integrative function of the mind, one prone to distortion but ultimately crucial to human identity. This wise book recognizes the complexity of memory development, its vulnerability to traumatic loss and distortion, and the value of its recovery.