Blackwell Reference Online

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When she was 27, Alice, a successful businesswoman, embarked upon a course of hypnotherapy to help her overcome an eating disorder. The hypnotherapist told her, ‘You will start to remember things – things that you won't want to remember but they still come flooding back.’ After six or seven sessions of hypnotherapy, Alice indeed began to recover memories of being sexually abused by her uncle sixteen years previously. Whilst Alice claimed to have always been aware that something was not right in her life, she also claimed that, prior to the hypnotherapy, she had had no memory of any episodes of abuse. ( Ost, 2000 : 10–15) In the last 20 years psychologists were involved in the ‘memory wars’, one of the most contentious debates to date – contentious enough that Pezdek & Banks (1996 : xii) refer to it as close to a ‘religious war’ (see also Brown, Goldstein & Bjorklund, 2000 ; Ost, 2003 ). The question that has caused such a divide in professional opinion concerns the extent to which memories, such as those ‘recovered’ by Alice, reflect events that actually occurred. Partly due to the uncertainties surrounding cases like these, the statutes of limitations, previously barring such cases from being tried in court, were lifted in many states in the USA (there are no time restrictions to bringing such charges under UK law). These changes enabled individuals like Alice to sue ... log in or subscribe to read full text