Trauma and Recovered Memory

Pilot study

When scientifically examining and therapeutically treating the victims of traumatizing incidences it is apparent that at first some of them cannot remember the precise cause of their manifold psychological and psychosomatic disorders. There is a nontrivial connection between the content and the duration of the traumatizing event on the one side and the question of the victim's persistent memory on the other side. Experiences of war, serious accidents, imprisonment in camps or as hostage are maybe not remembered in detail but the incidence itself is predominantly a persistent memory. In contrast, there seem to be four types of traumatization in which the memory of the traumatizing incidents are often missing over a longer period of time and have to be recovered spontaneously or in the course of a specific therapy: (1) intra-familial sexual abuse, (2) satanic ritualistic violence, (3) abduction by aliens and (4) violence experienced in a past life.

Despite the many differences between them (especially in regard to the status of reality which is associated with the particular phenomena in society) , these four phenomena are linked directly through the so-called recovery-paradigm: identical psychotherapeutic forms of practice (particularly regression hypnosis) are applied in the treatment of disorders caused by trauma to "bring back" the memory of the particular cause of trauma.

The conclusion of the final report of the pilot study: Proposal of a research project about the question of how it is possible - through regression hypnosis and similar procedures - for people to gain subjectively reliable memories of events which cannot have taken place according to the weltanschauung that is dominant in their culture. The answers to this question are to be found through a comparison of the processes and consequences of the recovered memory of events whose level of reality is judged quite differently in society and in the concerned academic disciplines.

It has not yet been decided at which time and in which form the main project will be realized.

Online-Publication:

Michael Schetsche: Trauma im gesellschaftlichen Diskurs. Deutungsmuster, Akteure, Öffentlichkeiten. [Trauma and Social Discourse. Patterns of Interpretation, Actors and the Public]