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" Richard J. McNally, a Harvard clinical research psychologist, considered the " politics of trauma" in Remembering Trauma (2003).[139] He argued that the definition of PTSD had been too broadly applied, and suggested narrowing it to include " only those stressors associated with serious injury or threat to life" —a suggestion that would drastically alter the public discussion of rape, incest, abuse by clergy, and the traumatic affect of racism and homophobia, to name just a few potentially trauma-inducing contexts and actions.[140] McNally presents his conclusion that most traumatic experience is remembered soon after the event, as if his view represents objective scientific research, when much evidence suggests that memories of traumatic events reoccur over time unpredictably. McNally’s bias is apparent in his strong support of Ian Hacking’s curiously fervent effort to discredit the diagnosis of multiple personality (dissociative identity disorder) and Hacking’s effort to blame clinicians attached to recovered memory therapy of the spurious " rewriting" of patients’ " souls." [141] While McNally accounts for those who do recall their traumas, he does not equally offer an explanation for those who do not remember them, and his extensive bibliography and research do not cite key publications that would challenge his results.[142] - Page 19 "
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" Both incest and the Holocaust have been subject to furious denial by perpetrators and other individuals and by highly organised groups such as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and the Committee for Historical Review. Incest and the Holocaust are vulnerable to this kind of concerted denial because of their unfathomability, the unjustifiability, and the threat they pose to the politics of patriarchy and anti-Semitism respectively. Over and over, survivors of the Holocaust attest that they were warned of what was happening in Poland but could not believe it at the time, could not believe it later as it was happening to them, and still to this day cannot believe what they, at the same time, know to have occurred. For Holocaust deniers this is a felicitous twist, for their arguments denying the Holocaust and therefore the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state capitalize on the discrepancies of faded memory. In the case of incest, although post-traumatic stress disorder, amnesia, and dissociation represent some of the mind's strategies for comprehending the incomprehensible, incest deniers have taken advantage of inconsistencies to discredit survivor testimony. "
― , Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust
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" Richard Gardner (2004), the creator of ‘‘parental alienation syndrome’’, considers that the ‘‘parental alienation syndrome (PAS) is primarily a disorder of childhood. The false memory syndrome (FMS) is a disorder of young adults, primarily women. They share in common a campaign of acrimony against a parent’’. In reality, these so-called syndromes are both used to discredit the testimony of individuals who claim to have been abused, sexually or otherwise. When adults report that they have recovered memories of childhood abuse, others may claim that they have false memory syndrome. When children do not repress or forget the abuse, if there is no period of amnesia, then some may claim that they have parental alienation syndrome (Ceci & Bruck, 1995; Dallam, 1999). "
― Jenny Ann Ryberg
