title: Try to Remember: Psychiatry's Clash over Meaning, Memory, and Mind
author:  Paul R. McHugh 
description: <DIV><DIV><P>&#8220;This is the absorbing, never-before-told story of how a cult of Freudian psychiatrists went on a witch-hunt across America &#8230; before a small band of scientists risked their reputations and livelihoods to expose the cult for what it was: a wacky pack a quacks.&#8221;&#8212;Tom Wolfe</P></DIV></DIV> (Tom Wolfe)<br /><br /><DIV><P>&#8220;America&#8217;'s premier pioneering biological psychiatrist Paul McHugh blows the whistle on sloppy and trendy thinking in psychiatry. . . . A must read.&#8221;&#8212;Michael S. Gazzaniga, Ph.D., author of <I>Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique</I></P></DIV> (Michael S. Gazzaniga)<br /><br /><DIV><P>&#8220;<I>Try to Remember</I> is a riveting account of his battle against the repressed memory movement. It is also a passionate plea for psychiatry as a humane science, grounded in evidence, and focused on helping people in the here and now.&#8221;&#8212;Michael J. Sandel, author of <I>The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering</I></P></DIV> (Michael J. Sandel)<br /><br /><DIV><P>&#8220;Readers of this splendid book will not forget its central lesson: If psychotherapists do not learn from their colossal mistakes, they will surely repeat them.&#8221;&#8212;Carol Tavris, Ph.D., co-author of <I>Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)</I></P></DIV> (Carol Tavris)<br /><br /><DIV><P>&#8220;Of all the mad ideas that have swept through the practice of psychiatry since Freud first undertook to map the unconscious, probably none has resulted in more cruelty to patients and their loved ones than those that led to the Recovered Memory Movement and its adjunct disease, Multiple Personality Disorder. . . . Paul McHugh is a healer.&#8221;&#8212;Midge Decter, author of <I>An Old Wife&#8217;s Tale</I></P></DIV> (Midge Decter)<br /><br /><DIV><P>&#8220;Engagingly written and accessible to a wide audience . . . a gold mine of fresh insights and constructive suggestions concerning how we can improve our system of psychiatric diagnosis.&#8221;&#8212;Richard J. McNally, Ph.D., author of <I>Remembering Trauma</I></P></DIV> (Richard J. McNally)<br /><br /><DIV><P>&#8220;Never has psychiatry been so simultaneously inundated with real science and with so much pseudoscience. . . . McHugh explains to uninitiated readers how he learned to tell the difference and where many of his colleagues went wrong.&#8221;&#8212; Alan Stone, M.D. Professor of Law and Psychiatry, Harvard University</P></DIV> (Alan Stone)<br /><br /><DIV><P>&#8220;Paul McHugh documents some of the absurd concepts introduced into psychiatry . . . his book is of equal interest to those outside the healing professions as it is to those within them.&#8221;&#8212; Sir David Goldberg, Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK</P></DIV> (Sir David Goldberg)<br /><br /><DIV>"Dr. McHugh has rendered a valuable service by describing the lamentable failture of self-criticism of doctors and therapists, some of them motivated by ideological zeal and others by hope of gain&#8212;and some, of course, by both. He has also given us a timely warning that we may expect further such episodes of popular delusion and the madness of crowds unless we straighten out our thoughts about the way our minds work&#8212;or, if that is not possible, at least about how they don't work."&#8212;Theodore Dalrymple, <I>Wall Street Journal</I></DIV> (Theodore Dalrymple <i>Wall Street Journal</i> 2008-11-20)<br /><br /><DIV>"As well as admirably empathetic accounts of troubling case studies and enjoyable subtle demolitions of rival 'colleagues,' the book offers a polemical primer on competing schools of thought in psychiatry over the last half-century. Lest the abuses he documents irreparably damage the reputation of psychotherapy, McHugh concludes, his profession ought to take a rigorously empirical approach to mental health, and cast out 'therapies built on suspicion.'"--Steven Poole, <I>Guardian </I>(UK)</DIV> (Steven Poole <i>Guardian</i>)
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  # Table Of Contents
  
  
  >
  
  
  [Sigmund
  Freud](Psychopathology%20of%20Everyday%20Lif_split_002.html#filepos2358)  
  [INTRODUCTION
  ](Psychopathology%20of%20Everyday%20Lif_split_002.html#filepos2495)  
  [CHAPTER 1. Forgetting of Proper Names
  ](Psychopathology%20of%20Everyday%20Lif_split_002.html#filepos4808)  
  [CHAPTER 2. Forgetting of Foreign Words
  ](Psychopathology%20of%20Everyday%20Lif_split_002.html#filepos18187)  
  [CHAPTER 3. Forgetting of Names and Order of Words
  ](Psychopathology%20of%20Everyday%20Lif_split_002.html#filepos32081)  
  [CHAPTER 4. Childhood and Concealing Memories
  ](Psychopathology%20of%20Everyday%20Lif_split_002.html#filepos66082)  
  [CHAPTER 5. Mistakes in Speech
  ](Psychopathology%20of%20Everyday%20Lif_split_003.html#filepos82154)  
  [CHAPTER 6. Mistakes in Reading and Writing
  ](Psychopathology%20of%20Everyday%20Lif_split_003.html#filepos142478)  
  [CHAPTER 7. Forgetting of Impressions and Resolutions
  ](Psychopathology%20of%20Everyday%20Lif_s