Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back Unknown - 1998

From the publisher

The transformation of childhood abuse from distant and forgotten events to salient, remembered experience has prompted much debate and controversy both in the media and in the academy. In the 1990s, the debate has centered on two approaches to remembering traumatic events. For some, recovered memories are accurate images of actual events that have been repressed; for others, recovered memories are fictions that are termed false memory syndrome. For Janice Haaken, neither position satisfactorily captures the power, the place, the role of memory for women. Pillar of Salt introduces the controversy over recollections of childhood sexual abuse as the window onto a much broader field of ideas concerning memory, storytelling, and the psychology of women. The book moves beyond the poles of true and false memories to show how women's stories reveal layers of gendered and ambiguous meanings, spanning a wide historical, cultural, literary, and clinical landscape. The author offers the concept of transformative remembering as an alternative framework for looking back, one that makes use of fantasy in understanding the narrative truth of childhood recollections. Pillar of Salt cuts a wide swath through modern Western history, extending the concept of transformative remembering into stories about the female self that have emerged historically in discourses on sexual abuse, hypnosis, and hysteria. As a constellation of topics, these writings portray a female subject in flux and a cultural situation where gender identity is unstable, thereby open to varying, sometimes conflicting interpretations. Haaken shows how ideas within psychology about concealed knowledge are influenced by largersocial and historical dynamics which shape the storytelling conventions available for creating an internally coherent narrative. Returning to the contemporary scene, Haaken works through the dilemmas of women storytellers from the vantage point of clinical practice. In making use of the concept of hidden knowledge, clinicians in the 1980s and early 1990s became mediums of a spellbinding genre of tales about the past, moving 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 women patients came to serve as conduits for rebellious currents within the mental health field. Haaken provides an alternative reading of clinical material, showing how sexual storytelling traverses the symbolic and the real and how the cultural repression of desire remains as problematic for women as does the psychological legacy of trauma.