Commentary: Questionable validity of ‘dissociative amnesia’ in trauma victims

Abstract

The article by Pope et al is a good illustration of why the literature on trauma and forgetting contains so many pitfalls for the unwary reader, and of how different commentators can come to radically different conclusions. As I have argued elsewhere (Brewin, 1996; Brewin & Andrews, 1997), many of the problems arise from questionable assumptions about the phenomena being studied and about what is good science. A different set of assumptions would, I believe, have led to fairer conclusions about the evidence on trauma and memory.