Bessel van der Kolk at his home in Massachusetts. Photo: Frankie Alduino
By Danielle Carr, New York Magazine, July 31, 2023
It’s bad news when your university creates a committee to ensure that you don’t publish any research papers without its approval. It’s worse news if the only other person facing similar scrutiny is a man investigating alien abductions. This was the situation facing the trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk in the mid-’90s when Harvard Medical School informed him that all of his future publications would be vetted for quality control. The other professor Harvard had slapped with a similar degree of oversight was psychiatrist John Mack, who had spent years studying people who claimed to have been taken by aliens and, by the mid-’90s, ended up believing them.
At the time, van der Kolk was in his early 50s and an academic star who looked the part: tall and winsomely thatched behind rimless glasses. “There was a sense that Mack and I were doing research that was equally wacky,” van der Kolk recalled. They did have one thing in common. Both studied people who claimed to have had experiences the scientists couldn’t definitively verify. But while Mack’s subjects gave detailed accounts of their alien encounters, van der Kolk’s patients had memories of horror that were more like fragments than coherent narratives, details that could lurch suddenly out of a dimly remembered past. The car-radio jingle that was playing before the explosion, the smell of the dollar-store deodorant he was wearing — these shards could hurl patients back into a state of panic. Traumatic memory, van der Kolk argued, is not so much a narrative about the past; it is a literal state of the body, one that can bypass conscious recall only to resurface years later.
This was the core of van der Kolk’s thesis: Traumatic memories are not ordinary memories. But then, trauma science is not ordinary science. By 1995, debates within traumatology had ignited a culture war that was beginning to devolve into a circus. Pruned of nuance by daytime shows like Oprah and Phil Donahue, van der Kolkian theories of traumatic dissociation had transmogrified into the “recovered memory” movement, in which masses of people, from well-meaning therapists to opportunistic grifters, coalesced around the idea that distinct memories of abuse could surface wholesale many years later.
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