Lenore Terr

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lenore C. Terr is a pediatric and adolescent psychiatrist and author known for her work with post traumatic stress disorder within children. Terr graduated from the University Michigan Med School with an MD. She is the winner of the Blanche Ittleson Award for her research on childhood trauma.^[1]

1 Career
2 Too Scared To Cry
3 Unchained Memories
4 Notes

[edit] Career

Terr has been studying the psychology of normal and disordered children her entire medical career. Starting as an academic psychiatrist at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, during which time she published two pioneering studies on "battered children," she then went on to practice psychiatry in San Francisco and to teach at University of California, San Francisco. Terr is best known for her important naturalistic and longitudinal study of the children involved in the 1976 school bus kidnapping in Chowchilla, California (and a comparison group of 25 children 100 miles to the south) set the standards for what is now accepted as childhood Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).^[2] In Terr's first book Too Scared To Cry, published by Basic Books in 1992 examined an event that occurred in 1976, when twenty–six California children were kidnapped from their school bus and buried alive for motives never explained. All the children survived. This bizarre event signaled the beginning of Lenore Terr’s landmark study on the effect of trauma on children. This book signified how trauma not only affected the children she treated but all of us. Her efforts to understand the impact of a single, prolonged trauma on a roughly normalitive group of children, and to compare her observations with reasonable control groups, sheds considerable light on how trauma becomes interwoven into psychological and behavioral repertoire of children. Terr's second book Unchained Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memories, Lost and Found consists of seven detailed cases designed to illustrate how memories can be repressed, dissociated or otherwise forgotten and later retrieved.^[3]

[edit] Too Scared To Cry

Terr's book Too Scared to Cry is divided into four parts focusing on the following aspects of childhood psychic trauma: emotions, mental work, behavior and treatment and contagion. Within this book she describes several cases that illustrate the troubling problem of children's statements and behaviors that are based in factitious traumatic events. Within this book she details the results of her review of twenty pre-schoolers, and concludes that trauma suffered before the age of three years old was rarely able to be fully described verbally, instead events were reenacted behaviorally. Lastly, Terr notes the distinction between a single, sudden traumatic event as being clearly held in a child's mind and subsequently accessible to verbal remembering, versus repetitive or prolonged trauma that severely compromises accurate verbal recall.

[edit] Unchained Memories

Unchained Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memories, Lost and Found consists of seven detailed cases designed to illustrate how memories can be repressed, dissociated or otherwise forgotten and later retrieved. Lenore Terr is a strong advocate for the theories of repression and dissociation of trauma and she is often cited by the recovered memory advocates. She believes that repressed memories, once retrieved, are highly detailed and accurate, although there may be some minor mistakes in what is recalled. She sees repressed memories as different from those that are dissociated. According to Terr, in repression, the individual unconsciously and energetically defends against remembering, whereas in dissociation the traumatic memories are set aside from normal consciousness during the event itself. Therefore, compared to the sharp and accurate details of retrieved repressed memories, those that are dissociated are likely to remain fuzzy, unclear, and filled with holes. Dissociated memories, according to Terr, rarely come back clear and complete.

Terr believes that traumatic memories operate differently than do ordinary memories. She claims there are two types of trauma. Type I traumas, which occur when the child is subjected to a single, unanticipated traumatic event, and which include full, clear, detailed verbal memories, although there may be some mistakes. The children kidnapped and buried in Chowchilla illustrate Type I traumas.

Type II traumas, which occur when there is longstanding or repeated exposure to trauma, result in dissociation or repression. The theory is that dissociation is a powerful and common defense against repeated childhood trauma and because the child dissociates during the trauma, the trauma is lost from conscious awareness. Terr has written previously on her many cases of children suffering documented trauma, and since in these cases, there are no instances of children over the age of three who are completely amnesic for the event, the repeated trauma theory is used to explain why children with documented trauma remember the trauma.