Memory's Pillar and the Experience of Sexual Trauma Commentary on Janice Haaken's Pillar of Salt

In Pillar of Salt, Janice Haaken questions the claims of the advocates of recovered memory by exploring memory through a psychoanalytic lens as a process of reconfiguring the past in the light of present needs and desires. Resisting reductive formulations, she examines contemporary stories of abuse and concludes that, whether factual or not, the recovered-memory syndrome that has so starkly emerged in the past 20 years is true to women's experience of oppression within an abusive patriarchal culture. Read within the framework of subjectivity and meaning, recovered memories provide women with dramatic self-representations that give narrative structure to the truths of their lives.