From 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.
As the idea of recovered memories went mainstream, growing ranks of middle-class women came to identify as traumatized, often by claiming to have resurfaced recollections of childhood sexual abuse. Patients with multiple personality disorder — with their shrink/co-author/agents in tow — sprang up to furnish harrowing accounts of the torture they had endured as children. People went to jail. It was fantastic television. Skeptics thundered that it was all gender radicalism and bullshit science, a culture of victimization — political correctness gone mad. As one of the researchers whose ideas formed a linchpin of the recovered-memory camp, van der Kolk was vulnerable to the backlash. After the psychiatry department closed down the trauma clinic he had spent 12 years building and put the quality-control order on his publications, van der Kolk stormed out of Harvard, shoulders chipped and with a determination to bend psychiatric orthodoxy back in his direction.
Nearly three decades after leaving Harvard, van der Kolk is currently the world’s most famous living psychiatrist and the author of The Body Keeps the Score, which has spent 248 weeks on the New York Times paperback-nonfiction best-seller list and counting.
* The Body Keeps the Score isn’t the kind of title you would expect to achieve cult status; it’s a technically dense overview of a theory of traumatic stress that once spurred 20 years of scientific controversy.
* In his ascent, van der Kolk has done for trauma what Carl Sagan did for the galaxy. Today, the prevalent trauma concept is fundamentally van der Kolkian: trauma as a state of the body, rather than a way of interpreting the past. This means that getting the patient unstuck from the past requires working with the body and teaching it to unbrace itself from a chronic “fight or flight” mode.
* Today, van der Kolk’s renown — built on translating neuroscience into language accessible to people searching for a cure for their pain — has placed him in a position straddling scientific celebrity and guru.
* But well into this echelon of success, van der Kolk remains palpably embattled. That first night, one attendee joked that, like everyone else there, he had come to learn from “his high holiness here, the holy man of trauma.” He gestured at van der Kolk, who was seated on the ashram’s dais. “Don’t call me that,” van der Kolk snapped back, suddenly on edge. “I’m not a holy man.” In response to questions indicating less than total buy-in, he may give the sense that he’s not exactly talking to you; it’s more like he’s letting you listen in while he corrects the errors of some invisible antagonist.
* As a traumatologist luminary, van der Kolk served as an expert witness for the prosecution in a series of clerical-abuse cases brought against the Catholic Church, testifying that it was scientifically plausible that a victim might not remember or recognize abuse until years later. Opposing the traumatologists were researchers like Elizabeth Loftus and Richard McNally, who argued that, actually, memory does work in a pretty straightforward way.
* Harvard Medical School undertook an investigation into the work on recovered memories done by van der Kolk’s research assistant; the data was later revealed to have been faked. When traumatology antagonist Richard McNally published Remembering Trauma in 2003, it was a victory lap at the end of the memory wars. Trauma had been reduced to its vulgarization and pronounced junk science.
* But the appeal of traumatic literalism is not so much its scientific rigor as its scientific sheen, which seems to promise objective, graspable solutions to our defining political crises.
* It was hard to think of a problem to which trauma therapy wouldn’t be the answer.
