A postscript on The Body Keeps the Score, on being out-read, and on who is permitted to doubt.
I want to begin by quoting myself, which is an uncomfortable way to begin anything.
In an essay I published a month or so ago, in which I argued that neither Bessel van der Kolk nor his most sophisticated critics had escaped their shared metaphysics, I wrote (almost in passing) that the book encouraged therapists to look for buried material "that, in many cases, was never buried in the first place." I wrote that clause, and I kept right on moving. I was pulling a different thread.
Then, last week, I listened to Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri spend the better part of two hours, on If Books Could Kill, pulling exactly that very thread... and a dozen others I had not touched at all.
I have been a listener of Hobbes for many years, back to the darkest days of the pandemic. I was a little late to the You're Wrong About party, and when I joined it I found years worth of his work with his cohost, Sarah Marshall. Now working with Peter Shamshiri on If Books and Aubrey Gordon on Maintenance Phase, Hobbes does some of the best independent journalism at a time when the traditional outlets have gotten hollowed out by new business models or (further) compromised by suspicious political commitments.
I subscribe to If Books Could Kill and am always excited when a new episode appears in my feed. So I came to the episode as an admirer, expecting to enjoy it, and I did. What I did not expect was to finish it with a small, specific, unwelcome feeling, which took me a day or two to name, and which brings us to this present moment and the composition of this piece.
It's not that I felt that these people who I have come to like and respect had done me dirty and refuted my work. They hadn't. We were not in the same argument. The feeling was that a person with no professional experience or standing in my field had gone through the book's scholarship — the actual citations, the actual numbers — and found it rotten in places I had moved straight past.
What he found
I will not recapitulate the whole episode. You should listen to it. It's legitimately outstanding. But the shape of it matters here. Hobbes did the unglamorous work of checking the book against its own sources, and what he found was not a subtle interpretive disagreement. He found fabricated statistics — an asthma figure, a testosterone figure — that do not appear in the cited studies and, in at least one case, the researcher confirms were never published. He found that nearly every clinical anecdote in the book is, by the author's own admission to another journalist, a composite, i.e. made up. That one I found gobsmacking. If an author is going to present case studies, they have to be actual cases... you know... actual people's stories. Composites can be ways of expressing something about your work, but they must be identified as such and they must not be, with a single exception, the entirety of your examples.
In a similar concerning vein, Hobbes found a systematic tenderness toward male perpetrators and a systematic coldness toward female victims. Further, he found, underneath the 2014 (massive) bestseller, its 1994 namesake — a paper whose thesis is that trauma is stored below narrative memory and must be retrieved — sitting in the middle of van der Kolk's years as a promoter of recovered-memory theory. This is the doctrine that gave us one of the ugliest episodes in the history of the field, about which I have written at length in work on Freud and the foreign body (forthcoming).
None of this was in my essay. My quarrel was with the book's deep structure: the definite article, the storage grammar, the metaphysics of a score kept somewhere. I was not attentive to the surface argument or its argumentation.
My discomfort, and its composition
Here is the part worth being honest about, because the discomfort turns out to be informative rather than merely unpleasant.
I did not check the surface, because I had granted the book a certain seriousness and professional standing. You cannot mount a metaphysical critique of a work you have already dismissed as shoddy. Serious critique requires serious subjects, and to have the argument I wanted to have, I had to treat the book as a real intellectual object whose error was philosophical. So... I attended to the deep structure with care and extended the surface the courtesy of assumed competence. It did not occur to me to ask whether the man had simply made his numbers up. That question felt, from where I was standing, undignified. I genuflected when I ought to have questioned.
That is the reflex I want to name, because it is precisely the one my own work exists to describe. The purifying drive of the psy-disciplines — what I have elsewhere called the ascesis of clinical reason — does not only decide what counts as knowledge. It decides which disputes are dignified. A metaphysical quarrel with van der Kolk is a dignified quarrel. It signals that I have read deeply, and that I have taken the ideas contained seriously. "Did this man fabricate evidence" is not a dignified question for someone inside the field to be caught asking. It reads as foolishly oppositional and philistine, as missing the depth. And so... the field quietly routes its own critics toward the respectable disagreement and away from the fact-check, and away from the commitments. It took someone with no dignity to protect to ask undignified questions. My gratitude to Hobbes for that!
This is why the outsider point is not a compliment I am reluctantly paying Hobbes. It is the whole goddamn matter. He could read the book without the softening because he stands outside the authority-structure that conditions softening in the therapeutic community. His freedom to doubt is not an amateur's licence: it is an epistemic asset the credentialed do not possess, because credentialing (which is supposed to sharpen judgement!) dulls it in exactly the region where the field protects its own. I was not being generous to van der Kolk out of some personal failing of nerve. I was being serious-minded and disciplined, in the technical sense, by a formation that works on everyone inside it. To my surprise, this includes me, whose whole intellectual/praxical project is a critique of the history and practice of the psy-disciplines including psychotherapy itself. Go figure.
The thread I did not pull
Return to the clause from No Bodies... No scores...: buried material that was never buried in the first place. I had the whole thing in my hand. The critique of the storage model, the falsity of repression as van der Kolk deploys it, and the entire recovered-memory catastrophe. It was all there... folded into that subordinate clause, and I set it down and reached for the metaphysics instead.
There is a research literature I did not reach for then that I will offer now, because I think it offers something substantial to the work that Hobbes started and makes his argument stronger: the clinicians he consulted told him the real problem in post-traumatic suffering is not forgetting but intrusive remembering, i.e. the incapacity to forget. PTSD is not about repressed memories; it is about memories that will not remain memories but become lived present(s), brought into an unbidden now from a sound or smell.
Here's the research that confirms the clinicians' experience: Michael Anderson's group has spent two decades demonstrating that intrusive memory is a failure of inhibitory control over retrieval. This means that those who we call resilient in the face of terrible events are precisely those who can suppress an unwanted memory when something cues it. People with PTSD cannot, with the worst deficit (lack of capacity to suppress or inhibit) tracking the worst symptoms.[1] The study of survivors of the 2015 Paris attacks made the point in Science: the difference between the exposed who developed PTSD and the exposed who did not was the integrity of the memory-control system.[2] This work refutes van der Kolk's storage model on its own ground, in the field's own flagship journals, and it says the thing his critics reached for without knowing it was already proven: the score is not buried and waiting to be dug up. The trouble is that it cannot be made to stay buried. The failure is inhibitory.
What survives
I am not revising the earlier essay. Its argument was aimed elsewhere, and it stands: the metaphysics critique never depended on the book's scholarship being sound. If anything, the fabrications are a second confirmation of the first diagnosis. A text organised around the conviction that suffering is a hidden deposit — kept in the tissue, waiting below the narrative — will tend to manufacture the deposits it needs. Invent the memory, invent the statistic, and compose the patient who recovers in a single miraculous scene. The false metaphysics and the false evidence are not two separate failings. One licenses the other.
So I was right about the score. But I was incurious about the surface, and the incuriosity is the datum.
What it leaves me with
What this episode leaves me with is a sharpened wariness about the texture of the thing: the way deference disguises itself as depth, as taking the work seriously, as being the kind of reader who does not stoop to checking the footnotes. Kudos to the disguise. It works well. It fooled me in my own essay, in a subordinate clause, while I was in the middle of arguing that the field cannot see what it has trained itself not to look for.
The outsider could see because he was outside. Which leaves a question for those of us who are inside, and who intend to stay, and who mean to keep writing against the grain of our own training: where else have we granted assumed seriousness to an authority for no better reason than that questioning it would have felt undignified? I have one documented instance. My eyes remain peeled.
tak to Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri, who did the reading.
Footnotes
¹ Ana Catarino, Charlotte S. Küpper, Aliza Werner-Seidler, Tim Dalgleish, and Michael C. Anderson, "Failing to Forget: Inhibitory-Control Deficits Compromise Memory Suppression in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder," Psychological Science 26, no. 5 (2015): 604–616. The foundational paradigm is Michael C. Anderson and Collin Green, "Suppressing Unwanted Memories by Executive Control," Nature 410 (2001): 366–369.
2 Alison Mary, Jacques Dayan, Giovanni Leone, et al., "Resilience after Trauma: The Role of Memory Suppression," Science 367, no. 6479 (2020): eaay8477.