Bessel van der Kolk

Dutch-American psychiatrist, born 8 July 1943 in The Hague under German occupation — his father was sent to a work camp, a fact he has connected to his subject. Middle of five children.

• Training: B.A. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (1965); M.D. University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine (1970); psychiatric residency at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Harvard Medical School, to 1974.
• Career: director of Boston State Hospital; staff psychiatrist at the Boston VA outpatient clinic — where he began working with Vietnam veterans; founded the Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1982; professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine; president of the Trauma Research Foundation.
• Research: PTSD from the 1970s on, including early pharmacological trials of fluoxetine and sertraline. Served on the DSM committees for PTSD in the 1980 and 1994 editions, and proposed developmental trauma disorder for children with chronic early adversity.
• the-body-keeps-the-score (2014) — nearly 300 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, 36 languages.

Two parts of the record cut against the rest.

Recovered memory. In the early 1990s he promoted recovered-memory therapy and testified as an expert witness in criminal cases. Trauma researchers criticised that work heavily afterwards, and Richard McNally’s attack on his 1994 implicit-memory paper — a theory “in search of a phenomenon” — comes out of the same dispute.

Dismissal. In January 2018 he was removed as medical director of the Trauma Center he had founded, following allegations of workplace mistreatment, which he disputed. He then set up a separate foundation.

He is the spoke’s clearest case of what the register problem looks like when the author does not concede: the peer-reviewed criticism accumulates on one side, the readership on the other, and neither moves the other.

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the-body-keeps-the-score · psychological-trauma · anna-lembke · robert-sapolsky · sigmund-freud · replication-crisis