International Handbook of Clinical Hypnosis - E-Lib FK UWKS

7
Hypnosis and Recovered
Memory: Evidence-Based
Practice
KEVIN M. MCCONKEY
University ofNew South Wales, Australia
INTRODUCTION
International Handbook of Clinical Hypnosis. Edited by G. D. Burrows, R. O. Stanley, P. B. Bloom
Copyright # 2001 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
ISBNs: 0-471-97009-3 Hardback); 0-470-84640-2 Electronic)
Memories can be accurate, inaccurate, incomplete, and malleable. They are sometimes
detailed and speci®c, and sometimes fragmentary and vague. People sometimes
remember things they had forgotten, and sometimes create accounts of things
that never happened. We know that memory is in¯uenced by cognitive and social
events and that in¯uence can occur during encoding, storage, and retrieval. As
Bartlett 1932/1995) argued: `Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable
®xed, lifeless, and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or
construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of
organized past reactions or experience' p. 213).
Memories reported in the clinical setting are usually autobiographical in nature.
That is, they usually involve events or experiences that have played a signi®cant
part in the life of the individual. If we are to understand such memories, then we
have to consider the purposes, processes, and products of autobiographical remembering,
and we have to embed that remembering within its biological, affective,
interpersonal, sociocultural, and historical contexts Bruner & Feldman, 1996;
Hirst & Manier, 1996; Rubin, 1996). In other words, remembering past experiences
is a pervasive part of life, and changes in an individual's life can be associated with
changes in remembering Fivush, Haden & Reese, 1996; Neisser & Fivush, 1994).
The critical place of memory in human experience is clear when we examine
individual lives in their social context, and that point needs to be kept in mind when
we consider the impact of hypnosis on memories reported in the clinical setting
McConkey, 1995).
There has been substantial debate about recovered memory in the clinical setting
e.g., Freyd, 1996; Herman, 1992; Loftus & Ketcham, 1994; Lynn & McConkey
1998; McConkey & Sheehan, 1995; Ofshe & Watters, 1994; Pezdek & Banks,
International Handbook of Clinical Hypnosis. Edited by G. D. Burrows, R. O. Stanley and P. B. Bloom
# 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd