Synthesising clinical case reports and the research literature on the effects of stress, suggestion and trauma on memory, Richard McNally arrives at significant conclusions, first and foremost that traumatic experiences are indeed unforgettable.

The Ethics of Remembering and the Consequences of Forgetting: Essays on Trauma, History, and Memory brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines that draw on multiple perspectives to address issues that arise at the intersection of trauma, history, and memory. Contributors include critical theorists, critical historians, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and a working artist. The authors use intergenerational trauma theory while also pushing and pulling at the edges of conventional understandings of how trauma is defined. This book respects the importance of the recuperation of memory and the creation of interstitial spaces where trauma might be voiced. The writers are consistent in showing a deep respect for the sociohistorical context of subjective formation and the political importance of recuperating dangerous memory—the kind of memory that some authorities go to great lengths to erase. The Ethics of Remembering and the Consequences of Forgetting is of interest to critical historians, critical social theorists, psychotherapists, psychosocial theorists, and to those exploring the possibilities of life as the practice of freedom.

Remembering Histories of Trauma compares and links Native American, First Nation and Jewish histories of traumatic memory. Using source material from both sides of the Atlantic, it examines the differences between ancestral experiences of genocide and the representation of those histories in public sites in the United States, Canada and Europe. Challenging the ways public bodies have used those histories to frame the cultural and political identity of regions, states, and nations, it considers the effects of those representations on internal group memory, external public memory and cultural assimilation. Offering new ways to understand the Native-Jewish encounter by highlighting shared critiques of public historical representation, Mailer seeks to transcend historical tensions between Native American studies and Holocaust studies. In linking and comparing European and American contexts of historical trauma and their representation in public memory, this book brings Native American studies, Jewish studies, early American history, Holocaust studies, and museum studies into conversation with each other. In revealing similarities in the public representation of Indigenous genocide and the Holocaust it offers common ground for Jewish and Indigenous histories, and provides a new framework to better understand the divergence between traumatic histories and the ways they are memorialized.

Relates the impact of trauma on the body to the phenomenon of somatic memory. The book illuminates the value of understanding the psychophysiology of trauma for both therapists and their traumatised clients. It progresses from relevant theory to applicable practice.

Are horrific experiences indelibly fixed in a victim’s memory? Or does the mind protect itself by banishing traumatic memories from consciousness? How victims remember trauma is the most controversial issue in psychology today, spilling out of consulting rooms and laboratories to capture headlines, rupture families, provoke legislative change, and influence criminal trials and civil suits. This book, by a clinician who is also a laboratory researcher, is the first comprehensive, balanced analysis of the clinical and scientific evidence bearing on this issue—and the first to provide definitive answers to the urgent questions at the heart of the controversy. Synthesizing clinical case reports and the vast research literature on the effects of stress, suggestion, and trauma on memory, Richard McNally arrives at significant conclusions, first and foremost that traumatic experiences are indeed unforgettable. Though people sometimes do not think about disturbing experiences for long periods of time, traumatic events rarely slip from awareness for very long; furthermore, McNally reminds us, failure to think about traumas—such as early sexual abuse—must not be confused with amnesia or an inability to remember them. In fact, the evidence for repressed memories of trauma—or even for repression at all—is surprisingly weak. A magisterial work of scholarship, panoramic in scope and nonpartisan throughout, this unfailingly lucid work will prove indispensable to anyone seeking to understand how people remember trauma.

Hedges shows that many recovered memories have their source in primitive anxieties: it is easy for the therapist and the client to externalise onto the past and onto supposed perpetrators the intensity of transference anxieties.

This collection of consistently interesting articles contributes to the very boom in studies of memory towards which the editors ambiguously claim some skepticism. JRAI [This volume] is an important anthropological contribution to this expanding field [of memories of past violence]...The ethnographic diversity of the chapters allows for cross-cultural comparison and, as the editors themselves underscore, for different methodological and analytical approaches. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale This collection of essays marks out fertile ground for anthropological investigations of memories of violence and trauma...the fine-grained analyses [ the wide ranging case studies contain] give the lie to any simplistic, ethnocentric and yet unversalising, explanations...it throws a stunning critical spotlight upon many contemporary 'Western' therapeutic approaches that insist upon the 'talking cure'...It makes a valuable contribution to the anthropology of time, memory and violence and is suitable for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Anthroplogical Notebooks This is a rich and stimulating collection...Taken together [these chapters] provide an excellent antidote to simplistic medical or psychological approaches to the long-term effects of violence on victims and their families. Paul Antze, York University, Toronto [A] timely and important collection that brings together a number of current literatures in anthropology and memory studies...The volume enriches and complicates the study of memory, while making at the same time a strong case for the distinctiveness of anthropology's potential to contribute to such an enterprise. Stuart McLean, University of Minnesota Psychologists have done a great deal of research on the effects of trauma on the individual, revealing the paradox that violent experiences are often secreted away beyond easy accessibility, becoming impossible to verbalize explicitly. However, comparatively little research has been done on the transgenerational effects of trauma and the means by which experiences are transmitted from person to person across time to become intrinsic parts of the social fabric. With eight contributions covering Africa, Central and South America, China, Europe, and the Middle East, this volume sheds new light on the role of memory in constructing popular histories - or historiographies - of violence in the absence of, or in contradistinction to, authoritative written histories. It brings new ethnographic data to light and presents a truly cross-cultural range of case studies that will greatly enhance the discussion of memory and violence across disciplines. Nicolas Argenti is a senior lecturer in social anthropology at Brunel University. He has conducted research in North West Cameroon and Southern Sri Lanka on youth, political violence, and embodied memory. His monograph, The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence and Belated Histories in the Cameroon Grassfields, was published in 2007. Katharina Schramm is a senior lecturer in social anthropology at the Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg. She has previously worked on the commemoration of the slave trade and cultural politics in Ghana. Her published works include African Homecoming: Panafricanism and the Politics of Heritage (2010) and Identity Politics and the New Genetics: Re/creating Categories of Difference and Belonging (201