Published by Blackwell Publishing Inc.32 VOLUME 12, NUMBER 1, FEBRUARY 2003 Abstract The controversy over the va-lidity of repressed and recoveredmemories of childhood sexualabuse (CSA) has been extraor-dinarily bitter. Yet data on cog-nitive functioning in peoplereporting repressed and recov-ered memories of trauma havebeen strikingly scarce. Recentlaboratory studies have beendesigned to test hypothesesabout cognitive mechanismsthat ought to be operative ifpeople can repress and recovermemories of trauma or if theycan form false memories oftrauma. Contrary to clinicallore, these studies have shownthat people reporting CSA his-tories are not characterized bya superior ability to forgettrauma-related material. Otherstudies have shown that individ-uals reporting recovered memo-ries of either CSA or abductionby space aliens are characterizedby heightened proneness to formfalse memories in certain labora-tory tasks. Although cognitivepsychology methods cannot dis-tinguish true memories fromfalse ones, these methods can il-luminate mechanisms for re-membering and forgettingamong people reporting historiesof trauma. Keywords recovered memories; trauma;repression; sexual abuse; dissoci-ationHow victims remember traumais among the most explosive issuesfacing psychology today. Most ex-perts agree that combat, rape, andother horrific experiences are un-forgettably engraved on the mind(Pope, Oliva, & Hudson, 1999). Butsome also believe that the mind candefend itself by banishing trau-matic memories from awareness,making it difficult for victims to re-member them until many yearslater (Brown, Scheflin, & Ham-mond, 1998).This controversy has spilled out ofthe clinics and cognitive psychologylaboratories, fracturing families, trig-gering legislative change, and de-termining outcomes in civil suitsand criminal trials. Most conten-tious has been the claim that vic-tims of childhood sexual abuse(CSA) often repress and then re-cover memories of their trauma inadulthood. 2 Some psychologistsbelieve that at least some of thesememories may be false—inadvert-ently created by risky therapeuticmethods (e.g., hypnosis, guidedimagery; Ceci & Loftus, 1994).One striking aspect of this con-troversy has been the paucity ofdata on cognitive functioning inpeople reporting repressed and re-covered memories of CSA. Accord-ingly, my colleagues and I havebeen conducting studies designedto test hypotheses about mecha-nisms that might enable people ei-ther to repress and recover memo-ries of trauma or to develop falsememories of trauma.For several of our studies, we re-cruited four groups of womenfrom the community. Subjects inthe repressed-memory group sus-pected they had been sexuallyabused as children, but they hadno explicit memories of abuse.Rather, they inferred their hiddenabuse history from diverse indicators,such as depressed mood, interper-sonal problems with men, dreams,and brief, recurrent visual images(e.g., of a penis), which they inter-preted as “flashbacks” of earlytrauma. Subjects in the recovered-memory group reported having re-membered their abuse after longperiods of not having thought about it. 3 Unable to corroborate theirreports, we cannot say whether thememories were true or false. Lack ofcorroboration, of course, does notmean that a memory is false. Subjects in the continuous-memory group saidthat they had never forgotten theirabuse, and subjects in the controlgroup reported never having beensexually abused. PERSONALITY TRAITS AND PSYCHIATRIC SYMPTOMS To characterize our subjects interms of personality traits and psy-chiatric symptoms, we asked themto complete a battery of question-naires measuring normal personalityvariation (e.g., differences in absorp-tion, which includes the tendency tofantasize and to become emotionallyengaged in movies and literature),depressive symptoms, posttraumaticstress disorder (PTSD) symptoms,and dissociative symptoms (alter-ations in consciousness, such as mem-ory lapses, feeling disconnected withone’s body, or episodes of “spacingout”; McNally, Clancy, Schacter, &Pitman, 2000b).There were striking similaritiesand differences among the groupsin terms of personality profiles andpsychiatric symptoms. Subjectswho had always remembered theirabuse were indistinguishable fromthose who said they had neverbeen abused on all personalitymeasures. Moreover, the continu-ous-memory and control groups Recovering Memories of Trauma: A View From the Laboratory Richard J. McNally 1 Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MassachusettsCopyright © 2003 American Psychological SocietyCURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 33 did not differ in their symptoms ofdepression, posttraumatic stress, ordissociation. However, on the mea-sure of negative affectivity—proneness to experience sadness,anxiety, anger, and guilt—the re-pressed-memory group scoredhigher than did either the continu-ous-memory or the control group,whereas the recovered-memorygroup scored midway between therepressed-memory group on the onehand and the continuous-memoryand control groups on the other.The repressed-memory subjectsreported more depressive, disso-ciative, and PTSD symptoms thandid continuous-memory and con-trol subjects. Repressed-memorysubjects also reported more depres-sive and PTSD symptoms than didrecovered-memory subjects, who,in turn, reported more dissociativeand PTSD symptoms than did con-trol subjects. Finally, the repressed-and recovered-memory groupsscored higher than the controlgroup on the measure of fantasyproneness, and the repressed-memory group scored higher thanthe continuous-memory group onthis measure.This psychometric study showsthat people who believe they har-bor repressed memories of sexualabuse are more psychologicallydistressed than those who say theyhave never forgotten their abuse. FORGETTING TRAUMA-RELATED MATERIAL Some clinical theorists believethat sexually molested childrenlearn to disengage their attentionduring episodes of abuse and allo-cate it elsewhere (e.g., Terr, 1991).If CSA survivors possess a height-ened ability to disengage attentionfrom threatening cues, impairingtheir subsequent memory for them,then this ability ought to be evidentin the laboratory. In our first exper-iment, we used directed-forgettingmethods to test this hypothesis(McNally, Metzger, Lasko, Clancy,& Pitman, 1998). Our subjects werethree groups of adult females: CSAsurvivors with PTSD, psychiatri-cally healthy CSA survivors, andnonabused control
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