The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse

When I read this book, the chapter about Lynn, I began to shake and then to cry. The author described my experience with a therapist from 1994 to 1999. For the past couple of years, I have been trying to put my life together and explain to myself what happened so I could try to explain it to my family. These kind and brave women gave me the words. These ladies are not shaming or cruel to sexual abuse victims at all. I thought they might be at first by reading the book jacket. They also helped me to understand why 5 years of my life went by in a fog where somehow I went from a fairly normal woman to a paranoid woman on 7 psycho-active drugs who couldn't function. I thought that "remembering" my memories would make me feel better. What I have learned since the hellish time is that what we focus on is what grows in our lives. Focusing on every detail of your trauma over and over again every single day will make that trauma the part of your life that grows so that you can't see much beyond it. I wish I could give this book to anyone who is even contemplating seeing a therapist or buying the book Courage To Heal. There are good therapists out there. I had one to help me climb out of my nightmare. If your therapist suggests that you try to remember things that you don't even know happened, please! please read this book first. If you were abused as a child, grieve it for a time. If you keep on going over and over it each day though, your abuser has not only hurt you as a child, but he is hurting you as an adult. After you feel sad for awhile, you have to pick yourself up and move on to create a happy life for yourself. You cannot change your past, and dwelling on it can only bring pain and shame. All I can say is that this book, not the Courage To Heal, has helped me to heal and to get my family back. May God bless the authors and the publishers for making their work available to me and others like me.

This book was the first book I read that provided clarity around repressed memories and their impact on families. It presents the slippery slope initiated by well-meaning people (therapists, psychiatrists, other survivors)trying to help a person recover from a painful childhood experience that leaves the person unable to effectively cope in their everyday world, separating them from family and friends. I was particularly appreciative of two chapters: Loose Spirits and Lost in a Shopping Mall. It provided grounding for me in "how" the pattern of paranoid behaviors and hallucinations could be triggered. It also points out the necessity of finding a therapist who is willing to challenge what seems to be "real memories". It provides hope that recovery truly is possible, if the right help can be found. Thank you Dr. Loftus and Ms. Ketcham. I am a family member of a person suffering from this debilitating phenomena. Watching the degeneration of a loved one is painful for everyone but particularly painful when "others" reinforce the unreal memories and put the family in a position of no longer being able to help someone they care about. I wish my sister would find a "good therapist" who would allow her to retrieve her soul and her life the way the women are doing in the Loose Spirits chapter.

Loftus is an expert on memory, a research psychologist who has spent a lifetime studying memory and how it works. She has often appeared as an expert witness in repressed memory cases including the George Franklin case in San Mateo County in 1990. The main point she and co-author Ketcham make in this calm and reasoned book is that so-called repressed memory is a fraud and its use by clinicians and the courts to imprison people is a tragedy and a disgrace.Needless to say the repressed memory industry was not pleased with this finding. Because she told the truth, they tried to brand Dr. Loftus as a traitor to the feminist cause. Industry members who had been making a nice living conjuring up repressed memories went on the attack, but she held her ground. What is amazing in this book is how well the authors maintain a balanced and fair attitude in the midst of such attacks. Loftus even met with Ellen Bass, co-author of the infamous The Courage To Heal (rightly dubbed The Courage to Hate by its victims) and managed to keep an even keel and a civil tongue.Loftus makes it clear that human memories are reconstructions. They are not accurate in a scientific sense, nor meant to be. Memories are reconstructions because what the tribal mind wants is conformity to what is believed by the tribe now. So human memories are intermittently reconstructed to conform to the "truth" as the individual under the influence of the tribe sees it at present. What happened years ago is important to the tribe only as it connects to the present, and it is usually the political present that is important. Therefore memories need not be factually accurate; it is far more important that they be politically correct. To make them politically correct they must be malleable since the political wisdom changes over time.The idea of "repressed" memories fits into this scenario wonderfully. The memory is said to be "repressed" until such time as it is politically necessary to retrieve it and then it is voodooed up and molded to fit the current power politics. It's like the rewriting of history in Orwell's 1984, or medieval trials by fire or water. Through the suggestive and coercive power of therapists (quasi-priests), memories are rewritten to suit the needs of the therapists, and alas, sometimes the needs of a district attorney bent on furthering his or her career at any price. (Janet Reno in her Dade County days is a case in point.)However, the reason the repressed memory of sexual abuse scenario became such a wide spread phenomenon in this country was not simply because it gave feminists power. That alone would not have done it. The hysteria was empowered by financial gain. Laws in many states were rewritten to restart the statute of limitations to begin at the time the "repressed memories" were conjured up, not when the alleged crimes took place (pp. 173-74). Now people could go after their parents many years after the fact,

Loftus was the first to make such a public declaration of skepticism about the theory of repressed and recovered memory, and considering the climate in which this book was written her bravery is commendable. At the time--and still perhaps today--some therapists diagnosed a history of incest within minutes of the intake session, spurious evidence was routinely admissible in the courts, and Multiple Personality Disorder was apparently as common as the flu. Things have changed, and there are more than a few red-faced recovered memory enthusiasts around these days.One of the things that becomes obvious in this book is the fact that, while the debate was a raging one, few people who took part in it understood what it was really about. The recovered/false memory debate is not about whether the sexual abuse of children is a lie, or that the family is the seat of all evil. It is an essentially scientific debate about the operations of memory and the clinical applications of such knowledge. Loftus navigates through the cultural and rhetorical detritus of the debate to this core issue, and we benefit from her position as an expert researcher.The book is clearly written for lay people, or for clinicians wanting a very quick summary of the issues. More clinically pertinent summaries of the research findings and theories are available elsewhere. If you're a therapist or researcher looking for professional information, you'll find the journalistic style slow going. However, if you're a lay person, the book is an excellent introduction to the debate.The core debate that Loftus addresses is not whether or not sexual abuse exists. Rather, what she wisely chose to target was the essential issues of defining "repression" and its validity as a concept, how memory storage and retrieval operate, and what the relationship between psychological trauma and memory impairment is. She demonstrates that the concept of repression is a dubious though not necessarily invalid one, but that far too much assumption and clinical arrogance were invested in the recovered memory mania of the 80s and 90s. This book was obviously controversial, but despite its lay orientation and stylistic flaws I believe it will endure as an important work in the history of psychotherapy. The legion of detractors demonstrated the truth of Loftus' thesis by construing the book as an attempt to disprove the existence of incest. And, because Loftus is a woman, she was a complicated target and therefore subjected to more condescending and intense attacks. Her accomplishment in this book was not to settle any questions, but to take the risk of attacking cherished, widely held, and richly funded clinical errors that were derailing public mental health and the reputation of psychotherapy. Highly recommended.

This book is a much-needed cry for sanity, much like Sagan's _The Demon-Haunted World_. The author, Elizabeth Loftus, is a well-known and well-respected psychologist who specializes in eyewitness memory; anybody who has taken a Gen Psych course should recognize her name. As a budding psychologist, I found Loftus's comments on the therapeutic community both insightful and well-directed. Her arguments are powerful and difficult to deny; she convinced me shortly after the first few chapters. Sexual abuse is a problem. A big one. But attempting to root out totally unconfirmed instances of sexual abuse is, as well. Loftus tries to walk a line between compassion for people who have truly been abused and those who believe they have, and scientific accuracy. Her sharpest knives are reserved for the therapists. The tools of therapy used to "recover" abuse memories which have no corroborating evidence are the same as those used to "uncover" reports of alien abduction, past lives, infant memories, and ritual cult torture. All the above are truly unlikely, so why would memories recovered using this method about abuse be any more accurate than memories about big-eyed aliens? All in all, this book does a marvelous job in presenting its points and should be a must-read for any serious student of psychology. It shows what a fragile thing memory really is; a lesson we all need to learn.