experiences a traumatic event develops PTSD symptoms. Perhaps it is because child sexual abuse is considered so abhorrent that it is difficult for therapists to accept that individuals can survive abuse without developing psychological problems. This may also be a function of the fact that therapists may only see those survivors who have developed psychological problems and have little experience of those who do not develop symptoms, as they do not present for therapy (Farrants, 1998).If not all abuse leads to symptoms, it could be argued that not all those abused require therapy. It is possible that defenses such as denial, repression or dissociation may have enabled some survivors to continue to function without developing pathological symptoms. If this is the case, it may be useful to leave these defenses intact, rather than to assume that such defenses are always more damaging to the individual than the uncovering of the trauma. Ceci and Loftus (1994) argue that if unconscious past memories lead to symptoms, one may be consciously dwelling on them. Campbell (1995) blames `New Age ideology that insight into symptoms leads to their alleviation, and that a relentless search for "confirmatory" imagery is therapeutic'. The possibility has been raised that an approach dealing with past trauma may detract from other important therapeutic issues (Haaken & Schlaps, 1991). Spiegal (1994) found no difference in the outcomes between treatments involving dealing with current symptoms and those involving working on past experiences. For this reason, Ceci and Loftus (1994) ask whether it is worth the risk of using memory recovery methods until the base rates for false recall are known; however, it is unlikely that this can ever be known for certain, given the frequent lack of external corroboration and the fact that false and true memories are indistinguishable in their nature (Lindsay & Read, 1994). The fact remains that the actual number of thos...
