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TITLE: PILLAR
OF SALT: Gender, Memory and
the Perils of Looking Back AUTHOR: Haaken, Janice ISBN pb: 1 85343419 1 PAGES: 316 LIST PRICE pb: £ 15.95 PUB DATE: 1998
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TITLE: PILLAR
OF SALT: Gender, Memory and
the Perils of Looking Back AUTHOR: Haaken, Janice ISBN pb: 1 85343419 1 PAGES: 316 LIST PRICE pb: £ 15.95 PUB DATE: 1998
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| DESCRIPTION: The transformation
of childhood abuse from distant, forgotten events to salient, remembered
experience has prompted much controversy. For some, recovered memories
are accurate images of actual events that have been repressed; for others,
these are fictions or false memory syndrome. For Janice Haaken, neither
position satisfactorily captures the power, the place, and the role of
memory for women. Her book shows how women's stories reveal layers of gendered
and ambiguous meanings, spanning a wide historical, cultural, literary,
and clinical landscape. In making use of the concept of hidden knowledge,
clinicians in the 1980s and early 1990s become mediums of a spellbinding
genre of tales about the past, from father/daughter incest to Gothic stories
of familial barbarism and sadistic orgiastic encounters. She explains how
these narratives dramatize more mundane forms of distress in women's lives
and how they precipitated rebellious currents within the mental health
field. Haaken provides an alternative reading of clinical material, showing
how sexual storytelling traveses the symbolic and the 'real' and how the
cultural repression of desire remains as problematic for women as does
the psychological legacy of trauma.
Janice Haaken is a professor of psychology at the Portland State University and a clinical psychologist in private practice. |
