Bessel van der Kolk
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Bessel van der Kolk and his views are under scrutiny. Which of van der Kolk’s theories must be considered incorrect? How have victims been harmed by flawed treatment? What do therapists need to know about the consequences of scientific dishonesty?
Bessel van der Kolk, Trauma and Psychology: What Those Affected Should Know
Hardly any other name has had such a lasting impact on the debate surrounding trauma as that of Bessel van der Kolk. His book *The Body Keeps the Score*, published in German as *Verkörperter Schrecken*, has sold over three million copies worldwide and is regarded as a standard work in many psychotherapy training programmes. This article examines what lies behind this fame: scientific errors and the consequences they have had, and why the debate is so important for those affected.
The criticism of Kolk is not a superficial rejection of popular scientific simplification. It concerns specific claims he has made in courtrooms, in therapy and in public psychology, which have created false certainties for many people. This article serves as a contribution to a debate that is still too rarely held in German-speaking countries, and which is of considerable practical importance for the handling of clinical concepts and therapeutic methods.
The body memory model: a metaphor and its clinical limitations
Van der Kolk’s central claim is the thesis that severe traumatic experiences, particularly those suffered in childhood or adolescence, are withdrawn from conscious access and instead stored in the body. The body retains what the conscious mind cannot recall. Trauma does not manifest itself as a narrative accessible through language , but as a physical reaction—trembling, freezing—a state that eludes the silence of linguistic understanding.
This concept provides people with a way of articulating suffering that defies conventional expression, and offers an explanation for depression, social difficulties and personality issues that appear to exist without any apparent cause. The fact that trauma leaves physical and neurobiological traces is well established clinically; no one seriously disputes this. What is problematic is Kolk’s conclusion: that memories of traumatic experiences not only have physical after-effects, but are always repressed, stored only physically, and can be specifically recovered through therapy. However, there is no scientific evidence to support this.
The thesis is based on an assumption about memory that is considered disproved in memory psychology: that highly distressing experiences are systematically repressed from consciousness yet remain intact, albeit unconsciously, within the body. Van der Kolk developed a treatment paradigm from this that has left a deep mark on clinical and forensic psychology.
Victims of a systematic error: the epidemic of false memories
In the 1980s and 1990s, a wave of therapeutically induced false memories emerged in the USA. In many cases, the victims of this movement were people who had had false memories implanted in them during suggestive group therapy, and whose relatives were subsequently prosecuted on this basis.
Van der Kolk played an active role in this context. He appeared as an expert witness in several trials and supported charges based on therapeutically induced memories. In the case of Chade v. Gregory (1996), he claimed before the court that the repression theory was universally accepted in the scientific community. However, this statement contradicted the state of research at the time. For the victims of these trials, this meant, in some cases, being convicted on the basis of memories whose reliability was already seriously doubted at the time.
The social dynamics of this movement are complex. It developed within a cultural climate that sought to take survivors of abuse seriously, whilst ignoring the findings of memory psychology. Therapists became investigators, patients became witnesses, and treatment became a form of evidence-gathering. The scientific and legal errors committed in the process are now well documented.
Childhood in court: when false memories become verdicts
Dealing with memories from early childhood is particularly problematic. Autobiographical memory only develops to any significant extent after the age of three; accounts of traumatic experiences from the first years of life cannot constitute reliable factual memories. They are narrative constructions arising from social expectations, therapeutic suggestion and repeated processing.
In psychotherapeutic settings and in court, however, such childhood memories have been treated as facts. A client who ‘remembers’ distressing experiences during therapy experiences them psychologically as real. This does not make the memory true. Research by Elizabeth Loftus, the leading authority in this field, shows that false memories generated through suggestion are experienced emotionally just as intensely as genuine ones; affect alone is not a criterion for factual truth, even though it was presented as such by van der Kolk.
For victims on both sides – those falsely accused and those into whom a false narrative of experience has been implanted – the consequences have been severe. Families have broken apart, convictions have followed, and people have developed psychological trauma as a result of interventions that were intended to help them. This is not a marginal phenomenon in psychotherapy; it is a documented structural failure. The difficulty that arises from this affects the entire field: how should those affected be treated on a scientific basis when the clinical ability to distinguish genuine from suggested memories is so limited, as research on lie detection shows?
A study without a control group: methodological errors with forensic consequences
The scientific foundation of van der Kolk’s thesis is a PET scan study that investigated deactivation of the Broca’s area during trauma-associated stimulation. Analysis of these findings led to the conclusion that traumatic memories are stored physically and non-narratively, beyond the reach of language. This study became a key source for therapeutic and forensic assessments of psychological symptoms.
However, the methodological flaws in the study are serious. There was no so-called control group. Without a comparison with healthy participants or people with other mental disorders, it is impossible to assess whether the observed response pattern is specific to traumatic memories. The material used for the provocation came from the participants themselves, which caused a pattern of ‘circularity’ in the PET scan. Furthermore, there is no comparison with intense but non-traumatic memories, a fundamental shortcoming for an analysis that claims to investigate specific neural functions.
Particularly concerning: despite these difficulties, the study served as the basis for a clinical approach that remains widespread in psychology. A serious discussion of its limitations has taken place virtually nowhere in popular accounts. This is a failure within the scientific community that extends beyond van der Kolk’s work.
What memory research really shows
Empirical memory research has refuted the assumption of complete repression of severe trauma. Highly emotional events are generally remembered better than neutral ones. What does occur is the forgetting of ambiguous, incomprehensible childhood experiences, including those that were not accessible to the child and which can later be reconstructed through therapeutic processing in the light of a traumatic narrative.
In “Remembering Trauma”, Richard McNally shows that people who have suffered severe trauma rarely forget it reliably. Research into the formation of false memories also demonstrates how psychologically complete false memories are generated through suggestive techniques . The danger posed by memory recovery methods is evidenced by tragic miscarriages of justice and is by no means fabricated.
Research findings consistently show that the ability to distinguish true from false statements is no better than chance, even among professionally trained therapists. The affective content of a memory, its internal coherence and the narrator’s emotional reaction are not reliable diagnostic criteria for factual truth, even if they are used as such.
Trauma as a cultural mirror: reservations about interpretative authority
Through scientific dishonesty, van der Kolk has helped shape a cultural mindset in which depression, social isolation, relationship problems and physical ailments are viewed primarily as the consequences of trauma. This framework acts as a mirror for collective experiences of exhaustion; it gives suffering a name, lends it legitimacy and connects a person’s personality with their life story in a way that provides psychological relief.
The problem is not the concern itself, but its exclusivity. If therapy is solely aimed at resolving physically stored trauma, other approaches are implicitly devalued. Cognitive-behavioural approaches, psychoanalytic work, pharmacological treatment of disorders – all of these take a back seat when the dominant model uses the body as an archive and body-oriented techniques as the sole means of healing the consequences of trauma. In line with the present research, it could be argued, however, that traumatic experiences can be addressed in many ways. The assumption that a specific body-oriented approach is the only beneficial one for all those affected is clinically untenable.
Institutional exclusion and unbroken media presence
The documented consequences for van der Kolk are remarkable – and remarkably inconsequential for his public standing. In 1996, an investigation by Harvard Medical School found that his close research colleague Danya Vardi had fabricated data. In a subsequent hearing, van der Kolk stated that he had known about the falsification ‘from the outset’ – even though he had previously praised Vardi’s research to the skies and used her as a co-author in court reports. Shortly after this hearing, his affiliation with Harvard came to an end. In a legal system where expert testimony forms the basis of criminal convictions, knowingly submitting falsified research data as evidence constitutes a serious breach of the law – regardless of whether he was prosecuted or not. Van der Kolk was subsequently dismissed from a number of court cases in which he had acted as an expert witness for the prosecution. In 2018, he was sacked as medical director of the Trauma Centre at the Justice Resource Institute (JRI) in Brookline, Massachusetts – the institution he himself had founded 35 years earlier – following complaints of intimidation and the creation of a hostile working environment. The institute’s management publicly stated that his behaviour constituted bullying and had devalued staff members. Van der Kolk himself described his dismissal as a “traumatic event”. In 2024, the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in New York banned him from the premises and excluded him from future courses following reports of anti-Semitic remarks during a workshop – he is said to have compared Israelis to Nazis . Despite these institutional exclusions – from the academic peer-review system, from his own clinical institution, and from one of the most prominent wellness retreat centres in the US – “The Body Keeps the Score” has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over 365 weeks. Van der Kolk continues to tour podcasts, social media channels and therapeutic training formats, in which the institutional and scientific background to his work is scarcely addressed. This pattern – institutional disqualification on the one hand, uncritical popularisation on the other – is itself a cultural diagnostic finding: it shows how little science and the attention economy of digital platforms communicate with one another.
Doubt as a scientifically honest stance
What remains? An influential body of work whose basic assumptions are, in significant respects, not supported by controlled research, and which has caused harm in forensic contexts that is virtually irreversible for many victims.
This article is not intended as a blanket rejection of body-centred trauma research. It raises concerns that require serious consideration. Psychotherapeutic practice needs reliable sources and transparency regarding the limits of its evidence base. Silence regarding methodological errors is not an act of scientific loyalty; it is a threat to the credibility of the entire discipline.
For those affected and victims, this means that scepticism towards therapeutic approaches based on unvalidated methods is a sensible precaution. Anyone who expresses doubts about popular narratives of trauma is acting in the interests of those affected.
Further reading: Richard J. McNally, ‘Remembering Trauma’ (2003); Mark Pendergrast, “The Repressed Memory Epidemic” (2017); Elizabeth Loftus & Katherine Ketcham, “The Myth of Repressed Memory” (1994); Timothy R. Levine, “Duped” (2019); Paul McHugh, “Try to Remember” (2008).
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