Title: 		FALSE MEMORY SYNDROME - IS IT POSSIBLE OR NOT?
 Memory is the mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experiences. A
 repressed memory is one that is retained in the sub conscious mind, where
 one is not aware of it but where it can still affect both conscious thoughts
 and behavior.
 
 When memory is distorted or confabulated, the result can be what has been
 called the False Memory  Syndrome: a condition in which a person's identity
 and interpersonal relationships are entered around a memory of traumatic
 experience which is objectively false but in which the person strongly
 believes. Note that the syndrome is not characterized by false memories as
 such. We all have memories that are inaccurate. Rather, the syndrome may be
 diagnosed when the memory is so deeply ingrained that it orients the
 individual's entire personality and lifestyle, in turn disrupting all sorts
 of other adaptive behaviors. The analogy to personality disorder is
 intentional. False memory syndrome is especially destructive because the
 person assiduously avoids confrontation with any evidence that might
 challenge the memory. Thus it takes on a life of its own, encapsulated and
 resistant to correction. The person may become so focused on the memory that
 he or she may be effectively distracted from coping with real problems in
 his or her life.
 
 -- John F. Kihlstrom, Ph.D.
 
 	There are many models which try to explain how memory works. Nevertheless,
 we do not know exactly how memory works. One of the most questionable models
 of memory is the one which assumes that every experience a person has had is
 'recorded' in memory and that some of these memories are of traumatic events
 too terrible to want to remember. These terrible memories are locked away in
 the sub conscious mind, i.e. repressed, only to be remembered in adulthood
 when some triggering event opens the door to the unconscious. And, both
 before and after the repressed memory is remembered, it causes physical and
 mental disorders in a person.
 
 	Some people have made an effort to explain their pain, even cancer, as
 coming from repressed memories of incest in the body. Scientists have
 studied related phenomenon such as people whose hands bleed in certain
 religious settings. Presumably such people, called stigmatics, "are not
 revealing unconscious memories of being crucified as young children, but
 rather are demonstrating a fascinating psychogenic anomaly that springs from
 their conscious fixation on the suffering of Christ. Similarly, it is
 possible that conscious fixation on the idea that one was sexually abused
 might increase the frequency of some physical symptoms, regardless of
 whether or not the abuse really occurred."(Lindsay & Read, 1994)
 
 	This view of memory has two elements: (1) the accuracy element and (2) the
 causal element. The reason this model is questionable is not because people
 don't have unpleasant or painful experiences they would rather forget, nor
 is it claiming that children often experience both wonderful and brutal
 things for which they have no conceptual or linguistic framework and hence
 are incapable of understanding them, much less relating it to others. It is
 questionable because this model  maintains that because (a) one is having
 problems of functioning as a healthy human being and (b) one remembers being
 abused as a child that therefore (A) one was abused as a child and (B) the
 childhood abuse is the cause of one's adulthood problems.
 
 	There is no evidence that supports the claim that we remember everything
 that we experience. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to support the
 claim that it is impossible for us to even attend to all the perceptual
 elements of any given experience, much less to recall them all. There is no
 evidence to support the claim that all memories of experiences happened as
 they remembered to have happened or that they have even happened at all. And
 there is no evidence to support the claim that subjective certainty about
 the accuracy of memories or the vividness of memories significantly
 correlates with accuracy. Finally, the claim of a causal connection between
 abuse and health or behavior does not warrant concluding that ill health,
 mental or physical, is a 'sign' of having been abused.
 
 	This model is the basis for a number of pseudoscientific works on child
 abuse by self-proclaimed experts such as Ellen Bass, E. Sue Blum, Laura
 Davis, Beverly Engel, Beverly Holman, Wendy Maltz and Mary Jane Williams.
 Through communal reinforcement many empirically unsupported notions,
 including the claim that about half of all women have been sexually abused,
 get treated as a 'fact' by many people. Psychologist Carol Tavris writes
 
 In what can only be called an incestuous arrangement, the authors of these
 books all rely on one another's work as supporting evidence for their own;
 they all recommend one another's books to their readers. If one of them
 comes up with a concocted statistic--such as "more than half of all women
 survivors of childhood sexual trauma "-- the numbers are traded like
 baseball cards, reprinted in every book and eventually enshrined as fact.
 Thus the cycle of misinformation, faulty statistics and unvalidated
 assertions maintains itself. (Tavris, 1993)
 
 	The only difference between this group of experts and say, a group of
 physicists is that the child abuse experts have achieved their status as
 authorities not by scientific training but by either (a) experience [they
 were victims themselves or they have treated victims of abuse in their
 capacity as social workers] or (b) they wrote a book on child abuse. The
 child abuse experts are not trained in scientific research which is not a
 comment on their ability to write or to do therapy, but which does seem to
 be one reason for their scientific illiteracy. (Tavris, 1993)
 
 	Here are a few of the unproved, unscientifically researched notions that
 are being bandied around by these child abuse experts: One, if you doubt
 that you were abused as a child or think that it might be your imagination,
 this is a sign of 'post-incest syndrome'. Two, if you can not remember any
 specific instances of being abused, but still have a feeling that something
 abusive happened to you, 'it probably did'. Three, when a person can not
 remember his or her childhood or have very fuzzy memories, 'incest must
 always be considered as a possibility'. And four, 'If you have any suspicion
 at all, if you have any memory, no matter how vague, it probably really
 happened. It is far more likely that you are blocking the memories, denying
 it happened'.
 	There have been many symptoms suggested as indicators of past abuse. These
 symptoms range from headaches to irritable bowls. In fact, one psychologist
 compiled a list of over 900 different symptoms that had been presented as
 proof of a history of abuse. When he reviewed the professional literature,
 he found that not one of the symptoms could be shown to be an inclusive
 indication of a history of abuse. Given the lack of consistent scientific
 evidence, therapists must be careful in declaring that abuse has infact
 occurred. (London, 1995)
 
 	Whole industries have been built up out of the hysteria that inevitably
 accompanies charges of  the sexual abuse of children. Therapists who are
 supposed to help children recover from the trauma of the abuse are hired to
 interrogate the child, in order to find out if they have been abused. But
 all too often the therapist suggests the abuse to the child and the child
 has 'memories' of being abused, but no rational person should find a parent
 or caretaker guilty on the basis of such tainted testimony. [note 1]
 
 	Increasingly throughout the continent, grown children under going
 therapeutic programs have come to believe that they suffer from "repressed
 memories" of incest and sexual abuse. While some reports of incest and
 sexual abuse are surely true, these decade delayed memories are too often
 the result of False Memory Syndrome caused by a disastrous "therapeutic"
 program. False Memory Syndrome has a devastating effect on the victim and
 typically produces a continuing dependency on the very program that creates
 the syndrome. False Memory Syndrome proceeds to destroy the psychological
 well being not only of the primary victim but through false accusations of
 incest and sexual abuse other members of the primary victim's family. The
 American Medical Association considers recovered memories of childhood
 sexual abuse to be of uncertain authenticity, which should be subject to
 external verification. The use of recovered memories is fraught with
 problems of potential misapplication.[note 2]
 
 	The dangers of this model are apparent: not only are false memories treated
 as real memories, but real memories of real abuse may be treated as false
 memories and may provide real abusers with a believable defense. In the end,
 no one benefits from encouraging a belief in memory which is unfounded.
 Whatever the theory of memory one advocates, if it does not entail examining
 corroborating evidence and attempting to independently verify claims of
 recollected abuse, it is a theory which will cause more harm than good.
 
 	Carl Jung, an early Freudian disciple and later heretic, extended this
 model of memory by adding another area of repressed memories to the
 unconscious mind, an area that was not based on individual past experiences
 at all: the "collective" unconscious. The collective unconscious is the
 repository for acts and mental patterns shared either by members of a
 culture or universally by all humans. Under certain conditions these
 manifest themselves as archetype: images, patterns and symbols, that are
 often seen in dreams or fantasies and that appear as themes in mythology,
 religion and fairy tales. The Archetype of the Archetype Model can be traced
 back to Plato's various beliefs about the eidos. (Forms of reality which
 were variously described by Plato but always were held up as 'more real'
 than the world of sense experience which, in some way, was always held up as
 inferior to and dependant on the eidos.)
 
 
 	The Platonic Model avoids the problem of determining whether or not a
 memory is accurate by claiming that the memory is not of a personal
 experience at all. It also confuses several types of mental states. It
 completely blurs the distinction between dream states and conscious states
 by eliminating the difference between remembering a sense experience one
 actually had and remembering a sense experience one never actually had. This
 model gives validity to every fantasy and desire. If one is clever, though,
 one can destroy the first model with the second one. For example, a Jungian
 could claim that the repressed memories of all those who are now blaming
 their current troubles on forgotten and repressed memories of child abuse,
 are not memories of actual abuse but of an Archetype, the Abused Child
 Archetype. The story of Hansel and Gretel might be pulled in for
 "scientific" support of the idea. Unsupported assertions might be made
 regarding the unconscious desire of all children to be loved by their
 parents: as children, love could only be understood in terms of ego
 gratification, but as adults love is understood primarily in sexual terms.
 Because of the incest taboo, we can not bear the thought of wanting to be
 loved sexually by our parents, so this desire must be expressed in a
 perverse and inverse way: our parents love us sexually. But there is no
 evidence for this based upon our past or current relationship with our
 parents, so the mind creates the evidence by remembering being sexually
 abused as a child. Thus, the memory we have as adults of being sexually
 abused by our parents is actually the expression of the universal desire to
 be loved by our mother and father. It has nothing to do with any real
 experience; it has everything to do with a universal human desire. It also
 serves as a convenient excuse to absolve us of all responsibility for our
 failures and incompetence. The reason we are so screwed up is because our
 parents screwed us!
 
 	How accurate and reliable is memory? We're often wrong in thinking we
 accurately remember things. Studies on memory have shown that we often
 construct our memories after the fact, that we are susceptible to
 suggestions from others that help us fill in the gaps in our memories of
 certain events. (Hyman, Jr., Husband & Billings, 1995) That is why, for
 example, a police officer investigating a crime should not show a picture of
 a single individual to a victim and ask if the victim recognizes the
 assailant. If the victim is then presented a line up and picks out the
 individual whose picture the victim had been shown, there is no way of
 knowing whether the victim is remembering the assailant or the picture.
 
 	Another interesting fact about memory is that studies have shown that there
 is no significant correlation between the subjective feeling of certainty a
 person has about memory and that memory being accurate. Also, contrary to
 what many believe, hypnosis does not aid memory's accuracy because subjects
 are extremely suggestible while under hypnosis. (Loftus, 1980) It is
 possible to create false memories in people's minds by suggestion.
 
 The mind does not record every detail of an event, but only a few features;
 we fill in the rest on what "must have been." For an event to make it to
 long term storage, a person has to perceive it, encode it and rehearse it
 --tell about it-- or it decays. (This seems to be the major mechanism behind
 childhood amnesia, the fact that children do not develop long term memory
 until roughly age three.) Otherwise, research finds, even emotional
 experiences we are sure we will never forget --the Kennedy assassination,
 the Challenger explosion-- will fade from memory, and errors will creep into
 the account that remain.(Travis, 1993)
 
 	Research articles and court testimony confirm the wide spread use of memory
 enhancement techniques, in the belief that these will help recover accurate
 "memories". These techniques include hypnosis, sodium amytal, dream
 interpretation, guided imagery, journaling, body massages, participation in
 survivor groups and reading of self help books. In the summer of 1993, the
 American Medical Association passed a resolution warning of the dangers of
 misapplication in the use of these techniques. In June of 1994 they issued a
 warning about all recovered memories. Both the AMA and the American
 Psychiatric Association have stated:
 
 ..there is no completely accurate way of determining the validity of reports
 in the absence of corroborating information.[note 3]
 
 	The problem with the practices mentioned above is that when they are used
 they increase the risk of influence and suggestibility.
 
 	Why would someone remember something so horrible if it really did not
 happen? This is a haunting question, but there are several possible
 explanations which might shed light on some of the false memories. A
 pseudomemory, for example, may be a kind of symbolic expression of troubled
 family relationships. There may be a cultural climate in our society in
 which the belief in the relationship between sexual abuse and individual
 pathology is nurtured. It may be that in such a climate people more readily
 believe things happened when they didn't. When people enter therapy, they do
 so to get better. They want to change. People also tend to look for some
 explanation for why they have a problem. Clients come to trust the person
 they have chosen to help them. Because they are trying to get better,
 clients tend to rely on the therapist's opinion. If the therapist believes
 that the reason that the client has a problem is because of some past
 trauma, and especially if the therapist believes that the patient will not
 get better unless he or she remembers the trauma, the patient will work to
 find what he or she thinks is a trauma memory in order to get better.
 Richard Ofshe, Ph.D. and Ethan Watters noted that, "No one -- not the
 patients, therapists, parents or critics of recovered memory therapy --
 question that this therapy is an intensely difficult and painful experience.
 That the pain of therapy is real should not be accepted, however, as an
 argument that the memories uncovered are accurate. One's emotional reaction
 to a perceived memory need not correlate with the veracity of that event,
 but rather only to whether one believes that event to be true."[note 4]
 
 	Therapists may believe that they are helping clients and improving a
 culture in which sex abuse is far too prevalent. A patient may find group
 acceptance in the cadre of survivors and find "the" reason for problems.
 Patients suffering from severe psychological symptoms are known to engage in
 what is called, "effort after meaning" (Bass & Davis, 1988), in that they
 seek some explanation, however remote, for suffering.
 
 	So, should accounts of repressed memory be dismissed out of hand? Of course
 not! But there should be an attempt to corroborate such memories with
 independent evidence and testimony before drawing conclusions about actual
 abuses or crimes. Such accounts should be taken very seriously and should be
 critically examined, giving them all the attention and investigative
 analysis we would give to any allegation of crime. But we should not rush to
 judgement, either about the accuracy of the memories of about the causal
 connection between past experiences and present problems. We should neither
 automatically reject as false memories which have been repressed for years
 and are suddenly recollected, nor should we automatically accept such
 memories as true. In terms of verification of their accuracy, these memories
 should not be treated any differently than any other type of memory.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 NOTES
 
 1. Yet, it has happened. In a modern version of the Salem witch hunts, the
 McMartin pre-school 	case exemplifies the very worst in institutionalized
 justice on the hunt for child molesters. 	
 
 See, Mason, M. (Sept. 1991). The McMartin case revisited: the conflict
 between social 			work and criminal justice, Social Work, v.36, no.5.
 391-396. [on evaluating the credibility 		of children as witnesses in sexual
 abuse cases] , 
 
 2. See, Council on Scientific Affairs, (1994).  American Medical
 Association, June 16.
 
 3. See, Council on Scientific Affairs, (1994).  American Medical
 Association, June 16.
 
 4.  See, Ofshe, R., & Watters, E., (1994). Making Monsters: False Memory,
 Psychotherapy and 		Sexual 	Hysteria.  p.109.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 REFERENCES
 
 
 Bass, E. & Davis, L., (1988). The Courage To Heal, p.173.
 
 Council on Scientific Affairs, (1994).  American Medical Association, June 16.
 
 Hyman, I.E. Jr., Husband, T.H. & Billings, F.J., (1995).  Prompting false
 childhood memories. 		Applied Cognitive Psychology, 9, pp.181-197.
 
 Lindsay, S. &  Read, D., (1994). Applied Cognitive Psychology, 8, p.302.
 
 London., (1995).  Independent Practitioner, March 1, 64.
 
 Loftus, E., (1980).  Memory, Surprising New Insights Into How We Remember
 and Why We 		Forget,  Reading, Mass,: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.
 
 Loftus, E., & Ketcham, K., (1987). Eye Witness Testimony: Civil and
 Criminal, New York, 		N.Y.: Kluwer Law Book Publishers. 
 
 Loftus, E., (1980).  Eye Witness Testimony, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
 University Press.
 
 Mason, M., (Sept. 1991). The McMartin case revisited: the conflict between
 social work and 		criminal justice," Social Work, 36, no. 5, pp.391-396.
 
 Ofshe, R., & Watters, E., (1994). Making Monsters: False Memory,
 Psychotherapy and Sexual 		Hysteria.  p.109.
 
 Tavris, C., (1993).  Hysteria and the Incest Survivor Machine, Sacramento
 Bee, Forum section, 		January 17, p.1.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 