FORTEAN TIMES UNCONVENTION 1996

[The scenario: Your adult child is feeling depressed and goes in to therapy. He or she comes out of therapy, saying you sexually abused him/her years ago and that is the cause of their problems. They had “repressed” the memories of the abuse and only now “recovered” the memories through therapy. You are accused of child sexual abuse and are taken to court. You lose your friends and your job. If you go to prison you will be treated as the lowest of the low. People’s lives hang in the balance over these “recovered memories”.... what are they?]

The British False Memory Society formed in 1993 as a result of an increasing number of reports of parents who claimed were wrongfully accused of sexual abuse by their adult children, who had no prior memory of being abused before going into therapy.

There is a cultural anxiety surrounding the subject of sexual abuse leading to problems such as over- exaggeration. The injustice of abuse is leading to other injustice.

Since 1993, seven hundred cased have been reported to the BFMS and since ‘93 seventeen thousand cases have been reported to the FMS foundation in America.

The “memories” don’t come suddenly but gradually. The methods of the therapists to “recover” these memories: age regression, dream analysis, psychodrama, necromancy (addressing dead/absent relative in an empty chair!).... The top method is hypnosis. Many therapists will not know what they’re doing. Many therapists are only interested in “narrative” truth.

To be accused is to be guilty. Crown prosecution services guideline use the words “victim” and “offender”.

There is incredibly emotional/powerful testimony. Juries are convicting in these cases without any corroborative evidence. The accused would pass a lie detector test. However, the accuser would too. The accuser would believe in the images.

How much do we know about memory?

It is wrong to think of “false memories” as simply “implants” according to Dr Mulhern (see previous lecture - SATANIC RITUAL ABUSE) but in the Washington University Experiment by Elizabeth Loftus, she used two brothers and interviewed them about childhood experiences. She was “in league” with one of them. She told him he was to pretend he could remember a time when his brother got lost. In the first session, his brother had no recollection of getting lost as a child. She told him to think about it and at the second session he was able to give a detailed story, even though it was a fantasy.

You cannot replicate a false belief of sexual abuse in a laboratory because it would not be ethical.

At the time of the Challenger Disaster, Ulrich Neiser, of Emery University (USA), thought it would be a good time to test flash forward memory. He asked students to write down where they were when they heard about the disaster. He kept these sheets of paper in a drawer for three years, at which time he asked the same students a second time where they were when they heard. They were to give themselves a “confidence mark”, depending on how sure they were they were remembering correctly. Comparing the second accounts to the original accounts, a significant amount of students got it right. But a significant amount of students got it wrong and were confident about it, giving themselves a high confidence mark for accurate memory.

When you are told you cannot be healed until you remember, you will come up with a memory.

The Melgram Experiment: Melgram got people to think they were going to a memory experiment. It was actually about punishment and learning. The “learner” was Melgram’s associate. The “teacher” was the volunteer, who was told (s)he had the ability to give the learner electric shocks with an apparatus connected to a “shock plate” on the learner’s chair. The device had several levels of voltage, which the teacher could adjust. The experiment involved word pairs. The teacher was to shock the learner when they made a mistake. Melgram wanted to know how far would people give shock level under the authority of the experimenter. Psychiatrists said they would stop when the learner complained. So, the learner did not complain, and sixty-five per cent of the subjects took it up to the maximum volt level (when the learner was not in proximity, and forty-five per cent did it when they had to put the learner’s hand on the shock plate themselves). Therefore, we can subject ourselves to authority.

This lecture took place on the twenty-first of April 1996, the one hundreth anniversary of Freud’s “seduction theory”. According to this theory, one hundred per cent of hysteric women patients had repressed memories of sexual abuse. Psychoanalysis was the treatment to be used. The popular myth is that the women came to Freud with abuse. But Freud was telling THEM that they were abused. He said he had to because women were reluctant to take on abuse.

Why are people going into therapy?

1. Broken marriage
2. Post natal depression
3. Studying to be therapists

Satanic Abuse - between five and seven per cent of FMS cases. Less and less common as years go on.

In THE PSYCHOLOGIST, the British Psychological Society magazine, the argument is that the abuse is real, because the children have repressed memories and so have the parents!

END NOTES

1 There is a difference between “recovered” memories and “retrieved” memories. We retrieve memories all day. Some come from way back. But in terms of “recovered” memories, the memory was allegedly pushed away deliberately into deep freeze.

2 Someone in the audience pointed out that Melgram could not replicate his experiment. The shocks were given by people who twigged the situation but gave the experimenter what he wanted. But that itself interesting from the FMS point of view, because the patient could be said to be giving the therapists WHAT THEY WANT.

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