Women's Narratives of Healing from the Effects of Child Sexual Abuse

ognizing, reminiscing, and reminding, that contest the self-enclosing character of strictly
intentionalist paradigms, and are intermediate in status.
Recognizing, reminiscing and reminding are “situated midway between mind and the
environing world,” and are not ways of remembering that manifest ‘in the world itself’.
Casey considers additional ways of remembering that are not ‘encased in mentalism’ but
rather are ways of remembering that are of being ‘in the world itself’.
These ways of
remembering include body memory, place memory and commemoration, which he contends
are non-intentional ways of remembering, and do not locate memory as ‘boxed’ or in the
mind. 8
How a woman determines that she was sexually abused as a child is related to the
process of signifying that what she remembers, was sexual abuse. Without a signifier that
what she experienced is called sexual abuse, she might not understand herself as someone
who was sexually abused as a child. The relationship of memory with signifying may be
tied to Casey’s delineation of reminding and recognizing.
Casey states that in any discussion of memory, the body cannot be neglected.
analysis of memory is relevant to memory in relation to child sexual abuse, because the
body is inherently central to remembering:
We remember in multiple ways: that the past need not come packaged in
the prescribed format of representational recollections. To fail to remember
in this format is not tantamount to failing to remember altogether. When one
memorial channel to the past becomes closed off, others often open up – indeed,
are often already on hand and fully operative. I may not retain a lucid mental
image of an acrimonious quarrel with a certain friend – I may have successfully
repressed it – and yet the same scene may be lingering in an inarticulate but
nonetheless powerful body memory. 8
His
Memory is not simply encoded in a bank of some sort in our mind, but is lingering in
the body. A person can have memories in her body that she is not accessing, retrieving or
somehow mentally recognizing. Casey states that body memory “alludes to memory that
is intrinsic to the body, to its own ways of remembering: how we remember in and by and
through the body.” 8 Casey distinguishes body memory from memory of the body. The
difference is that memory of the body is a way of representing ourselves as engaged in a
situation, and body memory is of being “in the situation itself again and feeling it through
our body.” He describes two major types of body memory: performative, or habitual; and
traumatic. He includes one additional type of body memory, the erotic. Casey also includes
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