Abuse was charged with reviewing relevant literature and making recommendations for future research directions as well as for clinical training and practice. To accomplish this charge, members of the Working Group agreed to review scholarly literature on trauma, child sexual abuse, and memory to provide possible explanations for the four most commonly identified memory recovery scenarios. In each scenario, an adult displays a series of psychological and psychosomatic symptoms before developing what are believed to be memories of having been sexually abused in childhood. One involves the recovery of child-abuse-related memories in the therapy setting; the other three, which involve the return of memory outside of therapy, concern (a) an individual who recalls abuse without therapeutic intervention, (b) an individual who believes that abuse has occurred without clear memory of abuse events per se, and (c) an individual who has no memory for abuse events despite the fact that external corroboration exists for them. Although these examples illustrate the range of memory recovery scenarios now documented in the clinical and research literature, it is of note that none of them necessarily explain how access to conscious cognitive memory was impeded or how such memories eventually became available.

As we stated in our review article (Alpert, Brown, & Courtois, 1998), a unique opportunity for the cross-fertilization of knowledge between psychological specialties is inherent in the current controversy on delayed memory:Working clinicians, especially those involved in treating individuals who report memories of being abused as children, would profit from greater familiarity with memory research both to bolster their understanding of human memory processes and to enhance their therapeutic technique. Researchers on human memory would likewise expand and diversify their knowledge base by incorporating the available data on traumatic stress, especially chronic interpersonal victimization, into new and ongoing research on memory, (p. 942) 1052 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

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The existence of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church has shocked many. In this article, the authors review the history of child sexual abuse in the church, the recent events that brought this tragedy into societal consciousness, and the efforts by the church to conceal the abuse. Two sources of empirical literature, the general psychological writing on priest sex abuse and the psychoanalytic literature, on child sexual abuse are compared. Both sources of literature seek explanation for priests' child sexual abuse within the structure and culture of the church rather than viewing the priest as a "typical" sex predator. The authors argue that, in fact, the guilty priests are child predators who differ little from other child predators.