Remembering Trauma by Richard J. McNally, Harvard University Press, £23.50/$35, ISBN 0674010825
CAN psychology ever be really dangerous? With the thorough, low-key style of a UN weapons inspector, Richard McNally, professor of psychology at Harvard, shows in this important book that debased psychological ideas can indeed generate weapons of mass destruction. Unlike Hans Blix, he has been able to ferret them out and show how they have been misused.
McNally illustrates in a measured, sometimes wry tone how contagious the pathogens of flawed psychology can be if they infest and spread through that most fundamental of psychological processes, memory. If,…
