Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back

"Pillar of Salt" introduces the controversy over recollections of childhood sexual abuse as the window onto a much broader field of ideas concerning memory, storytelling, and the psychology of women. The book moves beyond the poles of 'true' and 'false' memories to show how women's stories reveal layers of gendered and ambiguous meanings, spanning a wide historical, cultural, literary, and clinical landscape. "Pillar of Salt" cuts a wide swath through modern Western history, extending the concept of transformative remembering into stories about the female self that have emerged historically in discourses on sexual abuse, hypnosis, and hysteria. As a constellation of topics, these writings portray a female subject in flux and a cultural situation where gender identity is unstable and thereby open to varying, sometimes conflicting, interpretations. Haaken shows how ideas within psychology about 'concealed knowledge' are influenced by larger social and historical dynamics that shape the storytelling conventions available for creating an internally coherent narrative.

Pillar of Salt cogently and persuasively takes up knotty questions of testimony and truth that many of us have been struggling with. Scholars and students in psychology, psychotherapy, women's and cultural studies, trauma memoir, and the history of memory will welcome its wide-ranging framework. General readers, too, will find it an engaging study of recovered memory. Haaken's analysis is at once learned and lucid, deeply reflective and wonderfully concrete. -- Julia Watson, Ohio State University

A bold attempt to recover the lost art of storytelling and find a framework for undoing an important piece of today's unhappiness. -- Donald P.Spence, author of Narrative Truth and Historical Truth

Haaken offers the most subtle and insightful feminist reflections to date on the confusion raging around memory and narratives of trauma and abuse. Beautifully written, her book draws upon rich therapeutic experience and rigorous theoretical knowledge as it skillfully moves between the intricacies of women's experience and the complexities of the broader cultural landscape. An indispensable resource. -- Lynne Segal, author of Straight Sex; The Politics of Pleasure; and Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men

Richly evocative, wise, persuasive, and sometimes startling, Pillar of Salt remaps the contested terrain of memory, sexual abuse, and trauma theory. -- Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College

The writing in the book is beautiful: thick, lush, like the provocative ideas that come frequently, sometimes two or three on a page...The book generally leaves one in awe of the intelligence and breadth of the author but also with a sense of urgency that these ideas should be 'out there'-discussed and made a part of the many intellectual debates of the last twenty years. -- Sharon Lamb, author of The Trouble with Blame: Victims, Perpetrators, and Responsibility

Without denying the pervasiveness or trauma of sexual abuse, Haaken asks questions about the form of the public and professional debates, particularly as they involve recovered memories. Her fascinating, original, and persuasive argument moves between subtle intrapsychic experiences to larger social/cultural/political arena where they are given additional meanings, transformed, and reinternalized. It is a must read for therapists, women's studies scholars, women's advocates, and those interested in sophisticated understandings of gender politics. -- Susan Contratto, co-editor of A Feminist Clinician's Guide to the Memory Debate