From the New York Review of Books, an in-depth reveiw of a couple different books on the hot topic of “recovered memories”.
“False Memory Syndrome” has interested me for a very long time. I think it has to do with my fascination with the human mind, and my interest in brainwashing techniques, cults, mind-control, group-think, etc. etc. The interest may come from my acting training, and my interest in human psychology … not sure.
Rick Ross, a very controversial figure who breaks people out of cults, has an INCREDIBLE web site, which is THE web site to go to if you have a concern about a certain group’s practices. Needless to say, I could get completely lost on this site.
There are too many groups catalogued to even get into. Even tiny cults of 5 or 6 people get mentions. He is tireless.
He has, of course, a section on “false memories”. This is not so much a cult, as in Jonestown or anything like that – but a cult of psychology.
“Memory recovery” had its vogue, and is now on the way out, thank God. If any of you saw the film Capturing the Friedmans (which was chilling) you can see the effect this type of bogus therapy can have. Someone makes a claim that children have been sexually abused in the house of a man who teaches an after-school computer class. What is supposed to have happened is sexual abuse on a massive scale, involving group sex, orgies, etc. Only problem is: none of the kids really remember anything like that. They aren’t saying what the prosecutors obviously WANT them to say. If there is no memory of massive orgies, then the prosecutors have no case.
So each child is sent to therapy, to try to “recover” the memory.
And whaddya know, a bunch of children come out of therapy having “recovered” the memory of the trauma, in excruciating detail.
“Recovered memory” theory has pretty much been debunked, and many judges will not allow such testimony in the courtroom, and rightly so.
What has happened, in many cases, is that these “recovered memories” get more and more fantastical and bizarre … involving a group delusion of trauma or Satanic rituals where there were none. The human mind is so suggestive, so fragile in some ways.
Frederick C. Crews starts his review with:
Every now and then a book appears that can be instantly recognized as essential for its field–a work that must become standard reading if that field is to be purged of needless confusion and fortified against future errors of the same general kind. Such a book is Remembering Trauma, by the Harvard psychology professor Richard J. McNally. To be sure, the author’s intention is not revolutionary but only consolidating; he wants to show what has already been learned, through well-designed experiments and analyses of records, about the effects that psychological trauma typically exerts on our memory. But what has been learned is not what is widely believed, and McNally is obliged to clear away a heap of junk theory. In doing so, he provides a brilliant object lesson in the exercise of rational standards that are common to every science deserving of the name.
McNally’s title Remembering Trauma neatly encapsulates the opposing views that, for a whole generation now, have made the study of trauma into psychology’s most fiercely contested ground. Are scarring experiences well remembered in the usual sense of the term, or can some of them be remembered only much later, after the grip of a self-protective psychological mechanism has been relaxed? This is the pivotal issue that McNally decisively resolves. In the process, he also sheds light on a number of related questions. Does memory of trauma stand apart neurologically from normal memory? Does a certain kind of traumatic experience leave recognizable long-term effects that can vouch for its historical reality? What memory problems typify post-traumatic stress disorder, and does the disorder itself “occur in nature” or is it a cultural construct? And is memory retrieval a well-tested and effective means of helping adults to shed depression, anxiety, and other psychological afflictions?
McNally’s book provides examples of these runaway traumas:
In the 1980s, as McNally relates, day care workers risked prosecution and imprisonment on the coerced testimony of bewildered and intimidated three-year-olds who were prodded to “remember” nonexistent molestations. Meanwhile, poorly trained social workers, reasoning that signs of sexual curiosity in children must be “behavioral memories” of rape, were charging parents with incest and consigning their stunned offspring to foster homes. And most remarkably, whole communities were frantically attempting to expose envisioned covens of Satan worshipers who were said, largely on the basis of hypnotically unlocked “memories,” to be raising babies for sexual torture, ritual murder, and cannibal feasts around the patio grill.
In the same period many psychotherapists, employing hypnosis, dream analysis, “guided imagery,” “age regression,” and other suggestion-amplifying devices, persuaded their mostly female patients to “remember” having been molested by their fathers or stepfathers through much of their childhood, in some cases with the active participation of their mothers. The “perpetrators” thus fingered were devastated, embittered, and often publicly shamed, and only a minority of their accusers eventually recanted. Many, in fact, fell in with their therapists’ belief that young victims of sexual trauma, instead of consciously recalling what was done to them, are likely to develop multiple personalities. Disintegrating further, those unfortunates were then sent off to costly “dissociative identity” wards, where their fantasies of containing five, a dozen, or even hundreds of inner selves were humored until their insurance coverage expired and they were abandoned in a crazed condition. At the height of the scare, influential traumatologists were opining that “between twenty and fifty percent of psychiatric patients suffer from dissociative disorders” – disorders whose reported incidence plummeted toward zero as soon as some of the quacks who had promoted them began to be sued for malpractice.
Think I’m gonna have to pick up Remembering Trauma. Crews describes the essential problem as:
“how much damage can be done when mistaken ideas about the mind get infused with ideological zeal”
Red –
As I’m sure you are aware, this recovered memory stuff fits perfectly with the enshrined victimhood syndrome discussed in the Wolf posts. Take someone who has had serious problems in life, plant all manner of suggestions that might help explain their troubles, and see what grows. It’s such an appealing thing for anyone who’s already in distress – “See, none of my failures and problems are my fault! That explains everything!”
I’m not suggesting that memories cannot be suppressed by a traumatized person. I think it does happen. However, the process of a mental health professional “helping” someone recover those memories is so easily abused and fraught with peril that no outcome arising from it should be taken seriously, much less serve as the basis for a criminal prosecution.
The whole phenomenon does recall the witch hunting craze of an earlier time…
“Any comments? I read some article where a judge called it ‘junk science,’ but I don’t know if that’s the opinion of the Bar itself, or if it’s up to the judge to decide.”
The law of evidence is somewhat different in every state and in the federal courts, but without running a Westlaw search on the subject at work tomorrow I think I can still manage to spout off a few things. ;-)
The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, colloquially known as the “second-highest court in the land,” first laid out a test for the admissibality of scientific expert testimony in the 1920’s in Frye v. United States. The Frye rule was that such evidence was inadmissible unless “generally accepted” by the scientific field concerned, and although not controlling on the state courts, was treated as persuasive by them and widely adopted.
Frye, however, was an examination of the common law; it predated the Federal Rules of Evidence by several decades. Rule 702 of the FRE, governing expert testimony, uses considerably broader language than did Frye, and in Daubert v. Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in the early 1990’s, the US Supreme Court determined that 702 had indeed overriden Frye.
Under Daubert, expert testimony need not be generally accepted, only qualify as “scientific knowledge”, i.e., be derived by the scientific method and supported by “good grounds” in order to be considered reliable enough to be admitted. It must also, of course, meet the general relevance standard applicable to all evidence, i.e, that it would actually make some difference in determining the facts at issue. This all goes to admissibility not weight of the evidence, of course: it can all still, obviously, be discounted by the jury based on cross-examniation, rebuttal, etc.
In 1999, in Kumho Tire v. Carmichael, the Court clarified Daubert to make clear that its test of reliability also applies to non-scietific expert opinion testimony. Under Kumho Tire, federal district (trial) courts have wide discretion to apply whatever useful factors, whether specifically identified in Daubert or not, to make a determination of whether proferred evidence is sufficiently reliable to be admitted, and the circuit (appellate) courts will review only for an abuse of that discretion, not as a de novo matter of law.
Now, all that said, it’s just the development in the federal courts. Some states’ rules of evidence mirror FRE 702 and so Daubert and Kumho Tire, while not binding on them, are going to be very highly persuasive. Contrarily, most states’ rules still more closely resemble the old Frye test.
“Junk science” is basically whatever stays out. Wow, I feel like I’m my evidence professor. :-P
Mike R –
Yes – that connection did occur to me. A trend revealed. It’s horrible to think of these charlatans practicing “holistic therapy”, and “hands-on thereapy” – all with the stamp of approval (or at least the apathy) of the APA. Member that HORRIBLE story when that poor little girl DIED during a therapy situation where they were re-enacting her birth?
These people should be SHOT.
Dave J –
Thank you. The article I link to does mention that … because the APA has been so negligent, or at least so reluctant to stop these people from practicing, and have been reluctant to say, “There is no evidence that this kind of therapy has any value …” – what is scientific and what is just a trend has become blurred.
Sounds like this man has written an important book. I will have to check it out.