Haaken, Janice (Kay) 1947-

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HAAKEN, Janice (Kay) 1947-

PERSONAL:

Born March 2, 1947. Education: Everett Community College, R.N., 1969; University of Washington, B.S. (psychology), 1974; Wright Institute, Los Angeles, Ph.D. (social/clinical psychology), 1979.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Portland State University, Department of Psychology, 317 Cramer Hall, P.O. Box 751, Portland, OR 97207-0751. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Psychologist, educator, and author. University Hospital Clinical Research Center, University of Washington, Seattle, staff nurse, 1969-70, psychiatric nurse specialist, 1970-73; Mental Health Center, St. John's Hospital and Health Center, Santa Monica, CA, coordinator of staff training/clinical specialist, 1976-78; Portland State University, Portland, OR, clinic instructor of psychiatry, 1978-79, director of clinical training, 1979-86, associate professor, 1983-90, professor, 1991—.

MEMBER:

Oregon Psychological Association, Oregon Psychoanalytic Foundation.

WRITINGS:

Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1998.

Contributor to scholarly journals, including Journal of Psychoanalysis in Culture and Society, American Journal of Psychoanalysis, and Signs.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Corporate Illusions: Gender, Film, and Corporate Culture.

SIDELIGHTS:

A social justice activist and clinical psychologist, Janice Haaken is particularly interested in the ways in which people, especially women, remember and recount abuse and other traumatic events. Haaken explores these complexities in Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back. Writing in the wake of the 1980s-era controversy over recovered memories, Haaken explores the debate itself, rather than taking sides over the legitimacy of these memories. Instead, she uses history, culture, and psychology to examine the many ways in which women's memories have been treated, and sometimes suppressed. She frames her book around the story of Lot's wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt merely for "looking back," and draws on both feminist theory and her psychoanalytical training to seek deeper meanings behind the issues. As Cynthia Burack explained in the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, "For Haaken, the benefit of psychoanalysis for investigating the memory debate lies in what psychoanalysis shares with feminism: a 'mutual fascination with bodily states and the tension between public and private conceptions of the self' and a keen interest in 'concealed knowledge' and 'disguised communication.'" While many have emphasized the lasting impact of childhood traumas and memories, Haaken incorporates fantasies and contradictory desires into her approach, putting the entire subject into a larger context. As Jeanne Marecek noted in the Women's Review of Books, "Professional debates about recollected sexual abuse have lapsed into personal vendettas, harassment and name-calling.… Pillar of Salt is an effort to break out of this poisonous cycle, to change the terms of the discourse.…It shifts the focus from individual pathology to considerations of the collective and social dimensions of memory, trauma and sexuality." Haaken also confronts a number of interesting challenges within feminism itself, as Signs contributor Kareen Ror Malone commented: "Haaken's explorations are quite controversial, as it is tempting to maintain unambiguous positions over issues related to a woman's word, sexual aggression, and sexual desire.… Through her study of memory, Haaken does a superb job of returning feminism to the difficult questions that mark the relationships among power, sexuality, agency, and subjectivity. What she adds to the mix is a keen historical and clinical sensibility."