Unchained Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memory Loss

Terr's book is an astonishing look at the secret life we live inside our unconscious mind. Meticulously researched, thoroughly explained, this book should be required reading for every serious student of human motivation, psychology, criminology, and social science. I am both a therapist and a writer, and found high adventure and thought-provoking science in Terr's true-life accounts of traumatic memory. This is an invaluable resource, a unique contribution to the field of human understanding. Readable, engaging, and powerful!

I finished the book yesterday and my copy is now highlighted and bookmarked. This book is a compelling read on trauma and its effects on memory. Terr writes about her interviews and court cases with several adults abused/traumatized as children. The cases are fascinating and dispersed throughout the book are studies, findings, and a great deal of information about how the mind works and what happens to thoughts and memories when trauma surrounds them.

It was so good to read something on this dreadful subject by someone who did acutual studies of Trauma victims instead of just dismissing the subject and saying there is now way for someone to forget and remember such horrible things. More and more research is showing that truama leaves physical scars on the brain and I hope that it is only a matter of time before there is an easy and proven way to test a person with recovered memories for this physical proof to back them up when searching for justice. Thank God for Lenore Terr and researchers like her who are looking for the Truth and NOT a way to prove their ideas at the expence of the truth!

This is one of the very best books I have read. Lenore Terr is a psychiatrist who has devoted her career to the study of repressed memory and post traumatic stess syndrome both in children and adults who suffered traumatic events in their childhoods. Effectively weaving the biology of memory and the mechanics of suppression through seven highly publicized true stories, this book is fascinating, educating, and highly readable. Dr. Terr manages to convey a large amount of highly technical knowledge without talking down to the reader and manages to convey the knowledge in terms any layman can understand. The stories she shares, most of whom she has worked on, are interesting and are a testament to both man's capacity for cruelty and his (and hers) strength and ability to endure and eventually triumph. The first two chapters delve into the famous case of Eileen Franklin who testified against her father about the rape and murder of her childhood friend twenty years before. In recovering her memories, Eileen also discovers the physical and sexual abuse that, though "forgotten", has shaped her life for years. Dr. Terr interviewed Ms. Franklin on several occassions and eventually went on to testify at the trial overcoming the arguments of False Memory Syndrom advocate Elizabeth Loftus in eloquent and detailed terms. Subsequent chapters are equally fascinating. As a victim and a survivor myself, this book offered validation to my own suppressed memories and hope for brighter tomorrows.