47 pages • 1 hour read
Bessel van der KolkThe Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “The Imprint of Trauma”
Part 4, Chapter 11 Summary: “Uncovering Secrets: The Problem of Traumatic Memory”
Van der Kolk expands on the idea of repressed memories and the ways traumatic memory functions differently from normal memory. Memory becomes clearer when a person secretes more adrenaline (as in a dangerous situation), but too much adrenaline shuts off the rational mind. Van der Kolk explains: “As a result, the imprints of traumatic experience are organized not as coherent logical narratives but in fragmented sensory and emotional traces” (178). Van der Kolk also notes that while treating repressed memories is a challenge, explaining them to laypeople presents a different challenge, particularly in instances where traumatic memory becomes part of evidence given in a court of law.
Van der Kolk provides some historical context for the psychiatric study of traumatic memory, detailing how Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, and Sigmund Freud began studying “hysteria” in the late 19th century. Van der Kolk acknowledges that he learned most from Janet, who was “foremost a clinician whose goal was to treat his patients” (181). He adds, “Janet was the first to point out the difference between ‘narrative memory’—the stories people tell about trauma—and traumatic memory itself” (181).
Part 4, Chapter 12 Summary: “The Unbearable Heaviness of Remembering”
Van der Kolk continues both his comparison of traumatic memory to normal memory and his exploration of historical attitudes towards trauma. He tracks interest in and backlash to the idea of trauma from the late 19th century to the present day, noting that resurgence of interest usually coincides with a war, and backlash comes soon after. Repeatedly, wartime trauma—labeled through the decades as shell shock, war neurosis, or PTSD—eventually gets dismissed as “weakness.”
Exploring fluctuations in attitudes to trauma leads van der Kolk back to repressed memories. He notes that after interest in trauma went up again in the late 1980s and early 1990s in response to a boom in abuse and rape survivors coming forward, “articles had started to appear […] about a so-called False Memory Syndrome in which psychiatric patients supposedly manufactured elaborate false memories of sexual abuse” (191). Even in the face of “hundreds of scientific publications spanning well over a century documenting how memory of trauma can be repressed, only to resurface years or decades later” (192), the scientific community and society in general still deny the possibility.
Van der Kolk explains how a memory might be repressed. He also explores why the scientific community finds the concept hard to accept—primarily because the conditions that produce traumatic memories cannot be reproduced in a laboratory. He reiterates that traumatic memory appears as a disorganized collection of sensory perceptions and fragments without a clear narrative. Van der Kolk concludes this chapter with the story of a patient who experienced trauma from waking up during surgery, but eventually found healing through the types of treatments that van der Kolk endorses.
Part 4 Analysis
Building on the case he has made in prior parts of the text, particularly Part 3, van der Kolk continues his defense of proper trauma diagnosis and treatment. He focuses most on repressed memory, perhaps the most controversial aspect of trauma research. Since the onset of trauma cannot be reproduced in a lab, many researchers and members of the public deny its existence. Van der Kolk reiterates that repressed memory exists, citing numerous scientific studies in support, and explains how memories may become repressed.
In addition to defending repressed memory as a scientific fact, Van der Kolk provides examples of the same pattern happening repeatedly in recent history: Large numbers of people suffer trauma and interest in studying and treating trauma grows, but shortly after, society denies the existence of trauma, leaving the traumatized to suffer in silence. Van der Kolk points out that denial of trauma and categorizing PTSD as “weakness” can be devastating—for example, he claims it “played an important role in the rise of fascism and militarism around the world in the 1930s” (188).
