Subtitle: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back
Author: Janice Haaken
Subject: Women's Studies/Psychology
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2524-1
Paperback ISBN 0-8135-2837-2
Pages: 336 pp.
Description: The first book to examine the social symbolic meaning of women's contested stories of childhood sexual abuse

"Pillar of Salt . . . reframes recollected sexual abuse as storytelling and places it in historical perspective. It shifts the focus from individual pathology to considerations of the collective and social dimensions of memory, trauma, and sexuality. . . . A resolute and decisive refusal to muffle the complexity of women's sexual experiences."-The Women's Review of Books

"Writing from a feminist perspective, Haaken suggests that when, through male oppression, women are unable to speak openly, storytelling becomes a covert means of expressing their experiences, in particular sexual experiences. . . . An enlightening account of the importance of the cultural medium in which we tell our memories to others."-Times Literary Supplement

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. The author offers the concept of transformative remembering as an alternative framework for looking back, one that makes use of fantasy in understanding the narrative truth of childhood recollections.

Haaken provides an alternative reading of clinical material, showing how sexual storytelling transcends the symbolic and the "real" and how cultural repression of desire remains as problematic for women as the psychological legacy of trauma.

Janice Haaken is a professor of psychology at Portland State University, and a clinical psychologist in private practice.