Chris Brewin
Biographical Sketch
Chris Brewin is professor of clinical psychology at University College London, England, and consultant clinical psychologist with the Camden & Islington NHS Foundation Trust. For the past fifteen years he has been treating patients traumatised in childhood and adulthood using cognitive-behaviour therapy. He is widely known internationally for his research on traumatic memory and posttraumatic stress disorder, and has published two books and over fifty peer-reviewed journal articles on this topic. He was a member of the British Psychological Society’s working party on Recovered Memories and has been an expert witness in numerous UK trials involving recovered memories.
Abstract: A Theoretical Framework for Understanding Recovered Memory Experiences
The phenomenology of recovered memory is complex and indicates that these experiences are not always of the same content or type. An adequate theoretical account needs to cater not only for memory for autobiographical episodes, but for the framework of meaning in which they are embedded, as well as for meta-memory and involuntary memory phenomena. Naturalistic and experimental studies of memory, and of relevant clinical conditions such as delayed-onset posttraumatic stress disorder, now make it possible to specify different kinds of interaction between levels in a hierarchical model of autobiographical memory, and to describe the likely effect of trauma on each level. A variety of mechanisms can explain reduced availability or accessibility of content at each level of memory, and account for how memories are or appear to be recovered.