Recovered Memories - Seeking The Middle Ground

The phenomenon of recovered memories has excited much controversy in recent years amongst professionals with extreme positions being held: either all such memories are, by definition false, or any such claim is an attempt to deny the victims of abuse their rights to confront their abusers. In this refreshing new approach to the problem Graham Davies and Tim Dalgleish have assembled leading figures from both sides of the debate to provide a balanced overview of empirical evidence as well as evidence from clinical practice.

Recovered Memories: Seeking the middle ground, unlike most other writing on the topic, eschews extreme positions. It provides clinicians with findings from the latest research to enhance their understanding of memory and presents pure researchers with a range of experiences encountered in clinical practice for which they presently have few explanations. Topics include the impact on family and community members, the latest findings on implanted memories and discussion of clinical guidelines for therapeutic practice to avoid potential influence on memory. Having weighed the evidence, a framework is offered in which true and false recovered memories are seen as the inevitable compliment of true and false continuous memories.

This important new collection should not be missed by anyone with an interest in memory, whether engaged in a clinical, legal, child protection, family welfare or experimental research capacity. It is the most authoritative and comprehensive review of the evidence on both sides available to date.

Graham Davies is a Professor of Psychology at Leicester University, England, UK. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a Chartered Forensic Psychologist. His major research interests lie in the eyewitness testimony of children and adults, on which he has published some 100 papers and five books. Graham is regularly asked to provide training and advice to professionals working with child witnesses. He is currently chairing the consortium working with the British Government's Home Office to revise the Memorandum of Good Practice on Video Recorded Interviews with Child Witnesses for Criminal Proceedings (1992). His recent research has included evaluations for the Home Office of the Live Link (1991), videotape facilities for child witnesses (1195), and training procedures for police officers involved in investigative interviewing of children (1997). Graham is the immediate past Chair of the Society of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (SARMAC), and President-elect of the European Association of Psychology of Law.

Tim Dalgleish is the editor of Recovered Memories: Seeking the Middle Ground, published by Wiley.

About the Editors.

About the Contributors.

Introduction.

THE SOCIAL ASPECTS.

Socio-historical Perspective (T. Dalgleish & N. Morant).

Recovered Memories: Effects Upon the Family and Community (G. Gudjonsson).

Recovered Memories of Abuse: Effects on the Individual (A. Skinner).

Recovered Memories: The Legal Dilemmas (E. Magner & P. Parkinson).

EVIDENTIAL ASPECTS.

The Recovered Memories Controversy: Where Do We Go From Here? (D. Lindsay & J. Read).

Discovering Fact and Fiction: Case-based Analyses of Authentic and Fabricated Discovered Memories of Abuse (K. Shobe & J. Schooler).

Is It Possible to Discriminate True From False Memories? (G. Davies).

CLINICAL ASPECTS.

Therapeutic Techniques, Therapeutic Contexts and Memory (D. Bekerian & M. O'Neill).

Recovered Memories in Therapy Clinicians' Beliefs and Practices (B. Andrews).

Establishing Practice-based Guidelines for Therapists (N. Robertson).

Psychogenic Amnesias: Functional Memory Loss (M. Kopelman & J. Morton).

CONCLUDING COMMENTS.

Memories of Abuse and Alien Abduction: Close Encounters of a Therapeutic Kind (M. Power).

Author Index.

Subject Index.