If there’s one skill which will never lose its utility, it’s understanding why people believe false things.

Huh. I’m genuinely surprised that people don’t have more thoughts on this. Go figure.

My (male) ex ended up in the hands of a similar (female) therapist in the early 1990’s, right at the height of the “repressed memories” era. It caused untold damage to many people, although no one went to jail. I understand a person latching onto what seems like the perfect solution to all their problems - it was someone else’s fault they are so messed up!

It never occurred to me before, but I read “Sybil” as a young teenager, and my fascination with the book may have led me to not treat my ex’s claims with the skepticism they deserved. 

Huh….. you’ve given me something to think about.  I wonder how many other people bought into “repressed memories” in the 1980s/1990s because they read that book (or saw the tv movie) at an impressionable age.

Didn’t mean to discount the feminist aspect of your commentary; apologies if it came out that way. I hadn’t put the two (personal ambition colliding with feminism) together with this particular case. Running off to request the book at the library…...

I’ve often thought that some of the stranger things that came out of medieval convents were the result of placing large numbers of women in conditions which pretty much amounted to sensory deprivation - of course the dominant obsessions of the time (and the fact that the “therapists” of the time were all priests) meant that you ended up with reports of witchcraft and devil worship rather than child sex abuse: Huxley’s Devils of Loudun is about a case in 16th Century France which sounds very similar to Sybil. I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s uniquely 20th century pressures on women which cause this kind of behaviour: it’s quite a generic effect of living in an inherently sexist society. Short version: Feminism FTW.

I’m sorry to hear that, Noble. And certainly, it’s a complex issue. I’d argue basically that repressed memories/MPD hysteria was primarily caused by society’s inability to adjust rapidly to feminist demands, but obviously, once the diagnosis was out there, it was going to morph in all sorts of weird ways. Weirdly, for the same reasons that male victims of rape doesn’t take the issue of rape outside of a feminist analysis, false accusations from men claiming repressed memories of rape doesn’t change that from a feminist issue.

I think one thing that’s important to consider here is how much actual false accusations of rape differ from the picture anti-feminists paint of false accusations. In these cases, many of the people making the false accusations sincerely believe, on one level or another, that it happened to them. It’s a matter of mental illness and not vindictiveness. Anti-feminists claim that false rape accusations are a matter of vindictive women having consensual sex with men and then falsely accusing them because they “regret” the sex, and for some reason, it’s supposedly easier to go to the police than simply let it drop. The reality is much, much weirder. It’s worth noting that reputable anti-false accusation activists don’t engage with MRA nonsense like “parental alienation syndrome”. On the contrary, they fight the create of false syndromes for professional, political, or personal gain.

TFJ, for what it’s worth, I agree and so does Debbie Nathan. She frames the development of the MPD diagnosis in the context of other mental illnesses that inflict the marginalized, and in the history of things like “hysteria”, the diagnosis and not the social phenomenon. What makes this very complicated is that something like this requires a convergence of separate events/forces for it to all come together. It’s a matter of oppression meeting ambition meeting a tendency to disassociate/fantasize meeting a medical establishment that tends to dismiss women’s concerns as all in their head, etc. Similar events converge at various points in history.

Amanda, one reason why you’re seeing few comments might be because your blogging software is a little haywire. Your front page shows that this was posted at 10:31 and that there are 2 comments, but I can see 7 comments above me, including 6 that take place in the future (1:44 onward, though it’s only 1:30 in Toronto right now.)

National Center for Reason and Justice fights false accusations in the real world, which is to say they do so without minimizing the reality of rape and child abuse, and without engaging men who are trying to paint women with substantive accusations as crazy liars. As you see here, they oppose “parental alienation syndrome” as an unevidenced, trendy diagnosis.

http://ncrj.org/resources/info/experts/

One of my hopes is that online feminists spend more time with pro-feminist, pro-science, anti-abuse experts on false accusations, because one way to combat MRA claims about them is to have a better understanding of what false accusations/reports actually look like, and to understand why MRA claims have no bearing in reality.

Thanks, Mary! Our magic leprechaun behind the scenes is probably working on the site!

What saddens me is that doubt over this sort of case is probably a big part of the reason the skeptical community can’t quite deal with womens’ issues. I’ve seen at least one (probably more) skeptical websites specifically blame feminism (and even lesbianism, wtf) for false memory reports. That, in and of itself, is not rational, but skeptics tend to be human, and frequently rather bitter humans at that.

There’s so much comfort to be had by group validation - “look, I’m not the only one! I’m not making it up!”. TFJ’s point is an interesting one…. group hysteria has been documented many times (Salem witch trials, “Satanic panic” in day care centers). But “Sybil” gave it a validity that hadn’t existed before. Suddenly IT’S SCIENTIFIC! I’m not taking it up, science backs me up! That’s powerful. Unfortunately, debunking feeds into the right’s “science is bad” meme.

Brian, me too. The “lesbian” thing is particularly unnerving, as Dr. Wilbur was an avid homophobe who claimed that homosexuality was caused by domineering mothers. She really had an obsession with “domineering mothers”, a group that the mid-20th century seemed to believe encompassed all mothers.

  Noble, from what I’ve understood, at least in books that I’ve read, is that books like “The Courage to Heal” potentially stoked some of the ‘repressed memories’ obsession. It’s always tricky to talk about things like this, since I’m sure that that book helped many women deal with severe trauma that was still impacting their lives in some way. I’m sure that it would be comforting to someone who had been through something like that.

However, there are some things about the book that seem suspect. There are statements in the book that suggest that if you were abused as a child, you may not have memories of the actual abuse. Rather, you could just have a gut feeling, or you could have missing memories from a large portion of your childhood. Both of those, according to the authors, could signify repressed memories of abuse. Plus, the emphasis on trying to imagine the past events or thinking about details could lead to someone constructing a false memory of child abuse. Memory can be very malleable in that respect—ask a person to imagine a false event (like meeting Bugs Bunny at Disney World, or in worse cases, engaging in satanic ritual abuse) enough times and eventually that person will believe that the event was real, and that it actually happened.

    Of course, this means that it can be difficult to verify what’s a true memory of abuse and what is fabricated. One positive is that real memories of events have certain properties that fabricated events don’t—fabricated memories don’t tend to hold up if you ask people to recall the event in a different order from what they are used to. But I think that it’s interesting that the intersection Amanda speaks of seems to occur here as well—“The Courage to Heal” was meant to help women and comfort them. I’m hoping that it’s helped more people than it’s hurt through the rise of repressed or false memories.

  Hell, I’d think that a lot of false accusations come from sexist cops who dismiss 99% of rape complaints—-his words, not mine—-as false. (A cop whose comment I actually saw.)  I’d also say that false rape accusations are a direct result of sexual double standards. If women are valued only for the pristine condition of their vaginas and have so much to lose by having sex,  then if they do have sex,  they practically have to lie. Get rid of the double standard, get rid of the false rape accusations that actually come from women—-and not from sexist cops. 

  I saw one so-called false rape accusation activist whine that it was right up there with the BP oil spill.  Yeah, not rape….false rape accusations.

As for the Satanic Panic and stuff,  with the internet I got to see some of the videos from the interrogation sessions that made things like McMartin possible——and I was struck by just how much they resembled the sort of police interrogation sessions that produce false accusations.  Exactly the same techniques, except kids are way more suggestible and intimidated.  Anybody who thinks feeding a kid info like that while questioning him is the one who’s really deluded.

  There’s a book by Linda Fairstein before she took up fiction, and she gives a brisk course in false rape accusations as they actually exist:  the victim almost never names a name,  and often is in dire straits of some sort. She might very well have been raped, and not just once,  on other occasions. 

  Another report I read—-on The Curvature, maybe?——detailed the kind of situations that a genuine false rape accuser will use:  duh, she’s not going to use a situation that really happens commonly that people refuse to believe, she’s going to go for the one that people like to cherish,  because it’s so black and white.  It’s going to be the alley rape, with multiple assailants,  and so on.  Even Tawana Brawley made her accusation because she feared being beaten by an abusive father, and only named names when various charletons got involved.

    When women live in a world where men call rape ‘sex’ or ‘not taking no for an answer’ and other things, it’s in society’s best interests—-keeping women silenced——-to call mens’ perceptions reality and womens’  views insanity.  Which is what it seems like Mason,  Shreiber, and Wilbur were operating under.

Excellent points, ginmar. The reason that the Duke case was confusing at first was that her accusations were presented in a way that seemed more like a real rape accusation. Only over time did it turn out that actually, she had followed a similar format to false reporters, and the prosecutor screwed up by pushing her—-as they had with Tawana Brawley—-to start coming up with actual names under circumstances that made it harder for the the accuser to back off with her pride intact. If cops were better trained, we could reduce rare instances like that and improve the response to most rape accusations, which are true. Of course, it’s not useful to dismiss “too good” cases out of hand, either, because things like gang rapes by strangers do happen. They’re just not as common.

I’m not relieving a false accuser of responsibility by blaming law enforcement for bad questioning practices, by the way. But if you want to get to the bottom of a situation, it doesn’t hurt to leave the door open for a person with a fishy story to retract it without losing face. Encouraging people to double down doesn’t help anyone.

... deeply unethical (though often well-meaning)...

“Though”???  That seems like a thoroughly pulled punch to someone who is not just unethical, but “deeply” so.  Why so soft?

(insert “Hell’s Pavement” reference here.)

And what mode of questioning do bad cops like the most? You got it, there’s an element of competition and domination in questioning, where the detective claims a victory if he ‘wins’ a confession. There’s too much macho in bad cops.  (When I was busting shoplifters it was always amazing to me how stupid it was to escalate to a fight with the thief,  especially if the guy was handcuffed, which only made him more angry.  Almost all the male staff did that.  Jesus,  dude,  your nuts aren’t going to fall off if you say, “Sir,” or “Ma’am” to somebody who just got busted.) 

  I think the real reason MRAs are so pissed off over Duke is how the Duke slimebags’ own bad behavior worked against them,  because in the good old days, they’ve have been presented in the press as lilly-white pure-hearted choirboys. 

Unfortunately, I can see DAs and shitty cops going after desperate false accusers in order to save their faces.  And it’s funny how this vengefulness shows only with false rape accusations,  but with no other crime. Rape is both horrible and yet okay, as long as it’s not rape when you (general you) do it.  People want to believe accusations that are about people who couldn’t be them, whose actions don’t resemble their own. 

      The younger the person making the false accusation, the more I do in fact blame bad questioning.  My own drill sergeant had a girl at Basic who falsely accused another drill of something, but he had the wit—-and maybe the compassion——to see underneath it. She’d been abused sexually all her life by more than one relative,  and nobody believed her——till that drill.  She got help, for the first time in her life.  That’s why I’m shocked at how uneducated some of these people are in basic feminism,  especially if they’re working in a sensitive area like sexual assaults. 

  When somebody doubles down on a fragile false accuser who hasn’t named anybody—-and often false accusers aren’t as interested in pursuing any sort of case as they are in getting some kind of help——-it’s all about winning, about punishing that accuser.  The sort of cases that get no press are the ones that society least wants to hear about:  ‘good’ white boys committing rape, date rape, acquaintance, that kind of thing.  Those are the ones that you can tell the truth about all day long and nobody will listen.  (By the way,  just a thought: have you ever noticed how very very determined some DAs and prosecutors are when somebody they convicted turns out to be emphatically innocent,  complete with evidence, video, photos, fingerprints, etc., etc.,—-and they still won’t back down? Those people need to be booted from the job, at least for taking it too personally, too intimately.)

  If somebody’s in the sex crimes division, they should know this stuff.  Instead,  the New York Times quoted somebody recently from that almost-all male division as saying that he believed that if a rape victim wanted to talk to a female detective it was because she probably thought another woman would go easier on her than a man would—-and that, thus, she was lying. 

  I cannot imagine what it was like during that era when all the book originally came out,  when newspapers routinely printed rape victims’ names and juries on rape cases were by law limited to men in many states. Many states had laws that dictated signs of resistance.  Against that array of male power, women like Mason, etc., etc.,  had to either feel insane all the time——their perceptions were utterly unwelcome and invisible——or try and work inside those rules, use them against the very people who’d set them against them in the first place.

Does one have to have read Sybil in order to understand and enjoy this book?

No, Sarah. Nathan does an excellent job of detailing the contents without being boring, and quoting enough to give you a good idea of how it reads without going overboard. I’ve seen the movie and can attest that she summarizes its content well.

This falls into the bigger pattern of people with no real-world power finding some kind of mystical spiritual inner power, good or evil, healing or destructive, to make themselves special.  Spirituality and religion and psychology tend to muddle together in the modern world.  Possession.  Witchcraft.  Parapsychology.  Healing.  Curses. 

It’s the basis of most religions, that those who are powerless in this world are given a compensating power in the next one, but instead of having to die, you just go into another reality.

Applied to women you get the idea that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, men do everything to impress women and get laid, “you’re sitting on a gold mine” and so on.

  Amanda at 13: It really surprises me that mental health professionals clung to the belief that homosexuality was a mental health issue that could be “cured” for so long. This is mainly because Dr. Freud, while not entirely correct in his thoughts about homosexuality, thought that trying to “cure” it was an exercise in futility. It just seems weird that the idea that homosexuality could be “cured” came into existence and stuck around for so long since one of the important founders of the profession understood that you can’t transform a person’s sexual orientation.

  Brian at 11: I attribute this to the fact that a lot of skeptical men probably fall under the often talked about Nice Guy category and keep wondering why they don’t have girlfriends. They believe themselves to be witty, charming, and intellectually stimulating companions for women but are frustrated because they do not have girlfriends or wives. This leads them to misusing skepticism to justify misogyny. Skeptics in general might be bitter because many of us have a sort of missionary streak and we get frustrated with our inability to convince others of our viewpoint just in the way that a religious missionary could get frustrated with the inability of other people to see the obvious truth. When you combine intellectual and sexual frustration than you get a deep well of bitterness. It gets even worse if the skeptic has really strong political opinions.

It’s surprising that feminism would be blamed for this whole repressed memory thing, since the idea of repressed memories was invented by, or at least made popular by Freud.  And he wouldn’t qualify as feminist by anyone’s definition.

I can ‘t decide whether to read this book or not—for some reason the whole idea makes me anxious, perhaps a fear of how it will be used against women.

One review I read of this book seems to suggest that it casts doubt on the whole concept of multiple personality disorder (which outside of TV is exceptionally rare). 

Is this true?

“...It’s a matter of oppression meeting ambition meeting a tendency to disassociate/fantasize
    meeting a medical establishment that tends to dismiss women’s concerns as all in their head,...”

Not sure if the writer is suggesting that dissociating is a form of fantasy.  If he/she is, she’s wrong.  I can personally attest that dissociating is a very real experience.  If he/she is suggesting dissociation is a fantasy, to follow that assertion with the statement about people who dismiss women’s experiences as all in the head is revelatory.

Haven’t read the book, Amanda, but am unconvinced by what you write because you give me no facts to consider….only conclusions.

  maribelle: Anything can be misused by people who possess malicious intent. Sometimes even people with good intentions are capable of misusing things, see Frederic Wertham and the Seduction of the Innocent. Avoiding an interesting book just because some people are going to use it for evil purposes or at least to justify their horrible beliefs is not really going to help any. The misusers are going to do it any way.

  From my understanding, most mental health professionals do not put much stock into the idea of multiple personality disorders as a real mental disease in itself.

@Lee:  Thanks.  I didn’t know MPD had been largely debunked by professionals. 

What I worry about is the “once we thought this but now we completely know it’s wrong and denounce all ties to that line of thinking” ideology.  It’s too fundamentalist “i once was blind but now I see”.  I call it the “Amazing Grace” argument, and it works about as well in science as it does in religion.  It denies the ability of humans to learn, and grow, and reshape their understandings of the world without throwing out the baby with the bathwater every time. That is probably why I am nervous about reading the book.

Which brings me marydem’s comment:  Dissociation is a very real phenomenon, and identifying and uncovering this took too much of human history and (arguably) came at a great price.  Now, if some will say “okay, that’s baloney” I’m afraid the loss will be greater than any insight/knowledge gained.

Too bad this world we live in doesn’t do nuance so well.

No one is saying disassociation is a fantasy. Disassociating easily is linked to fantasizing, though. People whole disassociate often have the ability to generate vivid fantasies. In fact, fantasy is a form of disassociation. Like Nathan has suggested elsewhere, Mason’s fantasizing could have, if she’d had a better life, been channeled productively, perhaps into writing, which often causes mild disassociative states.

Feminism was putting forth this silly notion that women matter, and that when you had women saying “this was an event that happened to me and attention should be paid” it was all that bad feminism that made it national news instead of properly dismissed by the men in her life (father, husband, whomever). Kind of like blaming feminism for divorce rates - sure, they were incredibly happy wonderful marriages for both parties until that mean bad feminism came along and broke it up for no good reason. Or, just maybe, broken up marriages had been happening all the time, just feminism gave a different way of reacting to it. Reactions to traumatic experiences, pushing against society dictates, “hysterias,” etc. here - feminism may have altered the particular reaction at that point in time, but hardly invented them, nor are they to blame.

Sounds like a fascinating book, though. I’d never met a “true” multiple personality/disassociative identity patient, many who seemed closer to having watched too much TV and liked the idea because it worked well for the secondary gain. There is this “don’t think I’m sick? I’ll PROVE it to you!” by say, affecting a ‘demonic’ voice and hurting yourself/someone else.

I worry constantly because I have some pretty hazy memories of some pretty skeeze-y childhood experiences, but how much is true? I stay pretty far away from trying to add anything to them and instead accept that the memories aren’t going to get any clearer, but ugghh, what if it was like Sybil with the tonsillectomy? Wouldn’t it be better to know that? But what if it was worse? Which is pretty much why, despite people trying to convince me to confront family/people over this, I’ve never done so. What if I’m wrong?

By the way, this book is all facts. If you’re interested in fairly assessing the situation, read it. If I recounted all her proofs, this review would literally be as long as the book. A review is about reviewing the book, not rearguing it.

Actually, there has been research to show that MPD exists in reality, as a very rare disorder:

A multiple personality or DI will frequently and permanently isolate aspects of their “fragmented” traumatic experience into similarly “fragmented” alter egos. These created personalities are then likely to serve as mechanisms for coping with situations and events dealing with one particular aspect of the traumatic experience—i.e.- when the individual feels rage, an angry personality is conjured to display this temperament and deal with these emotional issues. This loss of continuity in memory and consciousness (in the form of “alter egos”) leads to an inability to establish a unified control system (9). In a sense, these personalities are themselves fragments and represent many incomplete selves, instead of a proliferation of selves (9). The development of “alter egos” can become extensive enough so that it is not uncommon to witness alters which display differences in gender, age, religion, handedness, handwriting, voice and even cerebral blood flow and brain electrical activity (9,14).

I don’t like boiling this down to “is MPD real”, because that’s not the right question. It suggests that we’re questioning that the trauma patients are enduring isn’t real, and they are very much suffering. The question is more, “What is causing patients to generate personalities like this?” Unfortunately, the answer seems to be “their therapist”. Most MPD patients do better as soon as they stop seeing their therapist, including Mason, whose happiest and most stable years of her life happened when she stopped spending time with Dr. Wilbur. Recovered memories are more of a “is it or isn’t it real?” question. Did the abuse the patient is recovering happen? The odds are very strongly against it, when it’s a “recovered” memory. The prevailing evidence is that repression just isn’t a thing. The fact of the matter is that if something is memorable—-such as being raped with utensils while hanging upside down from a meathook—-the victim tends to remember it pretty damn well. In fact, the research on memory and trauma suggests that the real problem is traumatic events are remembered *too* well, causing post-traumatic stress disorder, where the victim can’t stop going over the events in his or her head.

It’s important to tease out the separate issues here. People do disassociate during traumatic events, but that’s different than not remembering them. The way that people describe disassociation during a traumatic event is that they felt like they were on the outside looking in. They may report remarkable calm, even, or an inability to understand what was happening at the time. But they do remember it, often too well.

DA, you quoted a Biology 202 paper.  And many of the links in it don’t work.

But I have read the same thing, that DI is a real phenomenon but is much rarer than people think.  Though interestingly this article from the Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychiatry suggests it isn’t so rare, though focusing on the MPD aspects of the disease rather than some of the other symptoms has made it unduly controversial:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470479216.corpsy0280/full

According to the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM; American Psychiatric Association, 2000), DID is defined by the presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states that recurrently take control of the individual. The other essential diagnostic criterion is some degree of psychogenic or psychological amnesia. Although the DSM focuses on the issue of alternate identities, a core set of features of DID has also appeared in research and may be as essential as the diagnostic criteria. These features include severe depersonalization and derealization (feeling as if the self or surroundings are unreal in some way), a variety of memory problems (typically apparent amnesia for childhood or even ongoing events), identity alteration and confusion, and experiences of auditory hallucinations perceived as coming from inside the individual’s head. Some researchers (e.g., Dell, 2006) have argued that the DSM criteria should be revised to focus on these features. In fact, the current focus on the issue of alternate identities has probably only fueled controversies about the disorder with respect to its causes, diagnostic validity, prevalence, and treatment.

Also, I wouldn’t conflate skepticism with what women actually feel and experience with skepticism of memories that are “recovered” with the use of drugs, hypnosis, emotional pressure and other tactics that introduce suggestibility into a situation. I see why people get confused. Women are often not believed when they straight up remember something. I think insisting on believing people who are clearly and demonstrably confused doesn’t help the situation in the slightest, but ends up giving fuel to those who want to argue women should be disbelieved until proven otherwise.

I think ginmar’s points are apt here. The thing is that women who are disbelieved are not “recovering” memories, they aren’t fabulating, they aren’t fantasizing, and they often have no incentive whatsoever to make shit up. Contrasting their narratives with situations where that’s not the case helps strengthen the feminist argument that we can damn well tell the difference.

It’s important to tease out the separate issues here. People do disassociate during traumatic events, but that’s different than not remembering them. The way that people describe disassociation during a traumatic event is that they felt like they were on the outside looking in. They may report remarkable calm, even, or an inability to understand what was happening at the time. But they do remember it, often too well.
Comment #33: Amanda Marcotte on 01/02 at 06:06 PM

That’s not to say amnesia of trauma doesn’t occur, either.  But of course that doesn’t mean all “recovered memories” are valid.

I haven’t really seen the evidence for the contention that trauma itself induces amnesia. Obviously, someone who is traumatized while simultaneously in a blackout state—-such as if you’re raped while blackout drunk—-isn’t what I’m talking about. Since we (sadly) have a continuously traumatized population that has witnesses to their trauma—-soldiers returning from war—-I have to say that it seems that expansive studies on trauma and memory are totally doable.

Most MPD patients do better as soon as they stop seeing their therapist, including Mason, whose happiest and most stable years of her life happened when she stopped spending time with Dr. Wilbur.

While I agree that the therapist was the cause of many of Mason’s personalities, I have to point out the flaw in this type of reasoning.  Even with effective therapists, patients’ best times should coincide with the end of treatment.  I had CBT for my OCD, and it was extremely effective, but once my symptoms became very mild, I had no reason to continue treatment.

Additionally, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen any evidence that you can “recover” a memory. If only! It would make forgetting stuff less awful.

I read this book just a few weeks ago.  I remember reading “Sybil” in my teens and was fascinated by it - it was like reading a horror novel a la Stephen King, but supposed to be a true story.  As a teen, I wasn’t skeptical of Sybil - I had no life experience or educational background at that young age to think so.  So, at 42, reading this book was pretty eye opening.

Poor Shirley Mason - she was apparently a child with an active imagination and artistic, but she was raised by a strict Seventh Day Adventist family that discouraged reading any fiction at all, and storytelling.  Young Shirley tried to suppress and hide her flights of fancy from her parents as best she could - but at a terrible cost to her emotional and mental well being.

Dr. Wilbur had her own troubled past, as did Flora Schreiber.  All intelligent, talented women in their own ways; all fighting marginalization in different ways.  Unfortunately, they all came together and made Shirley sicker, not better.  The road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.

I’m willing to buy the idea that “repressed memory” in the way that it has become popular is likely a fiction. I’m not willing to write off all forms of memory repression though.  I think it’s only a short step from “don’t talk about that” to “don’t think about that” as a coping strategy. The difference is that the minefields are fairly well-marked.

One of the reasons I’ve not named my abuser except to a handful of people is because, after a decade of “don’t think about that,” (going on 20 years now) most of the my memories surrounding the incident are fuzzy and jumbled. I can’t tell you where or when, or even what year and month, or more than a few names of people who were on the same camping trip. Getting over the taboo of denial is important for my mental health, but that’s about as far as I’m willing to trust my memory.

    “.....Did the abuse the patient is recovering happen? The odds are very strongly against it, when it’s a “recovered” memory. The prevailing evidence is that repression just isn’t a thing….”

link please…

In the interest of people understanding what it’s like, here’s my experience.

When I dissociate, I am by no means fantasizing.  I often hear people associate it with daydreaming and I know many have had the experience of arriving at work, yet not remembering the drive there.  This is different though.  It is brought on by triggers, not just thoughtless, everyday happen-stance.  I am under what I perceive to be a threat.  I feel as though I have ricocheted to the ceiling and hear noise, but cannot distinguish what is being said.  I disconnect from myself.  I know where my physical body is.  I actually EXIST, am cognizant, in a fear-induced state.  I’m not making up an alternate reality.  That is my reality at that moment.  Does that sound like a fantasy? 

As far as recovered memory, I do not remember dissociating during my abuse (I was 7 yrs. old).  This is very difficult to admit but, I believe I did not dissociate because it wasn’t a violent assault but a family member and because it felt good.  I am revolted by it now.  My therapist says that’s normal.  Anyway…I remember everything up to the point of penetration.  (Incidently, my abuser admitted his crime after I was much older-18)  But…Should I ever flash on it, I will not be making it up.

As far as the physical abuse, I remember every fucking minute of it.

If it weren’t for Sybil, Sally Field might never have had a career beyond Gidget and Flying Nun. That was the role that gave her scenery-chomping experience that won her an Emmy and led to her getting dramatic movie roles. Back in the mid-seventies, when there wasn’t any cable-programming to speak of, TV-movies like Sybil got huge attention and ratings. And Sybil was among the biggest draws of its year. The success of the movie fed the success of the book(s), which fed the success of the movie.

Casting the great Joanne Woodward as Wilbur couldn’t have hurt in burnishing the rep of the real-life one. But think of it: what vehicles were there in that era for women actors to be more than ‘the girl’? Of course roles like Sybil and Wilbur would have been a magnet for the talent.

I think that the complete lack of attention to women’s (and boys’) reports of abuse in that era (not naming a particular patriarchal institution that comes to mind) and the normalization of behavior that today we would recognize as abuse or sexual assault also led to a sort of catch-22: how do you tell the difference between a case where the victim is confabulating and one where the non-victim witnesses have agreed to remember that thing didn’t happen that way? Sometimes there will be irrefutable inconsistencies on one side or the other, but sometimes there won’t.

The whole Freud thing is, of course, multiply interesting because (see Masson and the people who argued similarly a few years earlier) Freud apparently held two very different views: the earlier one that patients were repressing actual events that they had disguised under layers of symbols, and the later one that patients were repressing fantasies that they had learned to find unacceptable. Whatever the “truth” value of the earlier view, it suffered from the two fatal flaws of a) being very uncomfortable and b) threatening the supply of paying patients.

I have dissociated during trauma, and have only very fragmentary memories of what occurred at that time. I have zero interest in recovering those memories, which would be, how exactly I was raped by a family member who wanted to kill me.

I have dissociated under less horrifying circumstances, but still painful, and they were like marydem says: I was disconnected from my body, albeit consciously. What I mainly remember is my overwhelming fear and distress. Not what anyone else was doing. Time doesn’t seem to pass.

As someone old enough to remember, MPD was so accepted (?)  that it even made it into popular soap operas.  Vicki/Nicki Lord on One Life to Live. Victoria was a Landview socialite/heiress, and Nicki was a murderer, IIRC.

Additionally, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen any evidence that you can “recover” a memory. If only! It would make forgetting stuff less awful.
Comment #39: Amanda Marcotte on 01/02 at 07:03 PM

I’d say that is at least questionable for further explication.  What is the difference between remembering something you had really “forgotten” about - like smelling a fragrance and having it take you back to the memory of a time/place, or intuitively “knowing” something - in the sense of grasping knowledge.  That idea of recovering memories goes as far back in Western Civ as Socrates and Plato -  the slave boy and the doubled square in “The Men,.”  which may be an explanation of why it was so easy for people to accept.

There’s a Broadway revival out now on a the theme of reincarnation (“On A Clear Day”).  The original show and movie came out in 1965/1970 respectively, Sybil the book was written in 1973 and the film was done in 1976.  Predating this is “The Search for Bridey Murphy” from 1956.

Since reincarnation is the ultimate “recovered memory,” I wonder if cultural interest in it paved the way for the acceptance of recovered memory syndrome.

oldfeminist, There have been recent studies showing that there are biological traits that are changed with DMD:

Abstract

Having a sense of self is an explicit and high-level functional specialization of the human brain. The anatomical localization of self-awareness and the brain mechanisms involved in consciousness were investigated by functional neuroimaging different emotional mental states of core consciousness in patients with Multiple Personality Disorder (i.e., Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)). We demonstrate specific changes in localized brain activity consistent with their ability to generate at least two distinct mental states of self-awareness, each with its own access to autobiographical trauma-related memory. Our findings reveal the existence of different regional cerebral blood flow patterns for different senses of self. We present evidence for the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and the posterior associative cortices to have an integral role in conscious
experience

A bit more advanced than a 2nd year biology class, don’t you agree?

I wonder if cultural interest in it paved the way for the acceptance of recovered memory syndrome.

There was an enormous amount of interest in Eastern beliefs in the 1960s, oldfeminist, I think that provided a background as well because people were more familiar with the concept onwards than before the post-WWII popularizers like Alan Watts, D. T. Suzuki, started writing articles and books and giving talks on the radio and to college groups, etc.

Before that, the idea of Eastern religions was usually a ‘swami’ based somewhere in LA who specialized in separating rich, usually widowed or widowered older people from their money in return for dubious spiritual beliefs.

A couple of things being conflated in comments.

Is it possible to forget something and then later remember it? Sure. I’ve found entries in my notebooks of stories I started writing, that I had had no recollection of writing, but as soon as I read the story I remembered writing it.

Is it possible to dissociate during a negative experience, such that your memories of the event are very poor? Certainly, I’ve seen plenty of evidence of that.

But is it possible to forget that a traumatic experience happened at *all*? I understand remembering no details of the night a horrible thing happened, I understand not remembering whether or not a specific thing happened during that event, I understand not remembering who did it to you. But not remembering even that a bad thing happened? No, I don’t think that’s possible. I think the fact that a Very Awful Thing happened to you is permanently etched in your brain (unless you were drunk, drugged or suffered a head injury), and while you may not remember the details, you will always remember *that* it happened. You may recover details about the event later on, and in this sense you could be recovering a “repressed memory”, but it’s not really a repressed memory… it’s just a memory. The traumatic event disrupted your ability to record memories, so some stuff may have never been recorded, but other stuff may have been misfiled and can be recovered with a reminder, like a sudden accidental trigger.

The people who were recovering “repressed memories” were often people who had had no belief that anything seriously bad had happened to them at all before they went into therapy… they were just unhappy and didn’t know why. And the therapist would then encourage them to blame it on a repressed memory of abuse, and they would confabulate stuff and *believe* it and suffer trauma from it exactly as if it *had* really happened, except that since it didn’t, they were generally doing enormous damage to innocent people in the process. And often, once they were out of therapy, they would eventually realize that their “memories” hadn’t happened.

So yes, you can dissociate during a terrible event, and end up being unable to recall most of what happened during it, but you don’t forget the fact that there *was* a terrible event. If you then recover memories about that event, it’s not because you repressed them, it’s because trauma can disorganize the brain. And while you may not remember much of what happened and you may not remember what the perpetrators looked like, if they were people you know, you probably realized that they were the ones who victimized you pretty soon after the event happened, because something about *them* would remind you. You wouldn’t forget that your dad raped you for twenty years and then suddenly remember it in therapy, and you certainly wouldn’t forget it if it had happened every night for five years. Even if you remember absolutely nothing about the event, you are likely to remember it as a fact, like a sound bite.

I was bullied as a child. I don’t have a photographic memory of every instance of bullying. Some things that happened, I remember. Other things I can’t actually see in my head, so I remember them as a factual description—“I attended a mother/daughter dinner and the other kids wouldn’t sit next to me and my mother.” Don’t actually remember anything about that, and I might have forgotten *that* it happened if my mother hadn’t talked to me about it.  But is it anything that surprises me in the slightest or is at all inconsistent with the rest of my childhood? Hell no. Other things, I remember as if I’m watching them, rather than being part of them, and all the emotional content is stripped out. But I still remember them. I still know they happened.

I think if you forgot, completely, that a specific Bad Thing happened, it would only be because it didn’t surprise you and was basically part of your normal life. I imagine that kids who never get spanked would remember the one time ever that they got spanked in traumatic detail, whereas kids who got spanked a lot probably don’t remember most of the spankings. But that’s because they knew the spankings were happening, they knew who was doing it, it didn’t surprise them… it was part of normal life, so the brain compressed it to save space.

Unique and highly emotional events are remembered. Details may be lost, but the fact that the event happened remains. If a series of similar events happened, the details of most of the instances may be lost, but the fact that the events occurred will remain.

So no. I don’t think there’s any evidence to support the kinds of “repressed memory” that these folks were told they suffered from. Yes to dissociation, yes to loss of detail memory, yes to sudden recovery of details… no to having forgotten entirely that the whole thing happened.

I liked the first comment the best.

I read this book months ago and have followed the Amazon reviews.  It is so very difficult to believe the story that Nathan weaves about the three women.  It is obvious that her ongoing agenda and passion concerning the ‘satanic panic’ and false memories - her need to protect those accused of child abuse and thus, to disprove DID as a valid dx steers unaware readers to ‘buy’ unfounded conclusion throughout the book, but mostly in the last two chapters.  It is a shame that readers don’t learn more about the False Memory Syndrome and Nathan’s affiliation with the National Center for Reason - to gain a bit more of an objective look at this book. 

Dissociative Identity Disorder is a valid diagnosis - in the DSMIV - used by professionals to bill insurance - who btw do cover treatment for the diagnosis.  MPD - now called DID - has not been largely debunked by professionals.  Who told you that?  My gosh, you all need to do your homework. 

Please see the ISST-D website for information that is true and conclusive.  Tabloid books, gossip, ranting, raving - etc. is not going to drown the truth, though it does encourage debate - I guess, that is a plus.

Go to it.  Bye and thank you for respecting my opinions.

Perhaps it was just the circle I ran in in the mid to late 80s, but it sure seemed that recovered memory of abuse was ubiquitous.  All 3 women I dated in 86/7 experienced it.  It got to the point that I would check out a potential date’s bookshelves and would head for the hills if I saw either “Courage to Heal” or “Women Who Love too Much”.  Interestingly, these women were really smart and introspective, were committed feminists (one working full time at a shelter for battered women, one get a feminist PhD), and had to deal with genuinely horrible examples of sexism in both their personal and professional lives.  Even in hindsight I don’t know what to make of the phenomenon.

If it weren’t for Sybil, Sally Field might never have had a career beyond Gidget and Flying Nun.

And how! I recently read the original Sybil and re-watched the movie before I read Nathan’s book and when I was all finished I thought, well at least Sally Field’s acting is still awesome - her performance really stood the test of time.

Great review Amanda. I was also struck by how well Nathan was able to explain why these women perpetrated this fraud without absolving them from responsibility. She is an amazing journalist and I am looking forward to whatever she tackles next.

oldfeminist, There have been recent studies showing that there are biological traits that are changed with DMD:

A bit more advanced than a 2nd year biology class, don’t you agree?

Absolutely, I wasn’t questioning the concept; just noting that the initial web page you used wasn’t up to the usual standard.

Now you’re starting to sound like my late feminist mother, oldfeminist

Dark Avenger, that sounds like a very high compliment, and I thank you for it.

  The women least likely to be believed,  of course, are often the ones telling a truth that people don’t want to hear,  probably something common place, something intimate.  My own mother was involuntarily committed in the late Fifties solely on the word of a doctor who went off on her when he finally diagnosed my sister with the tuberculosis that had by then spread to the whole family.  He didn’t like her attitude, and because he was white, a man, and a doctor,  he did this at least several times to other people, many of them women.  (My mother was instantly marked for release once she arrived at the mental hospital by staffers who’d had to deal with the guy before.)  Such was his power that the mere accusation of mental instability was enough to tarnish anyone he flung it at, but especially women, given the stereotypes in place about women, ‘hysteria’, lying,  emotional over-reactions, and all that.  That time period roughly coincides with Sybil,  but women still feel the pressure of being regarded as deficient from the get go,  often in ways that people are not consciously aware of. 

I’ve had some experience with trauma, but I wonder how much of it is indvidualized?  You can very successfully push memories away repeatedly till they vanish for long periods of time. Another thing that makes me wonder, again based on experience, is how many of these claims happened along with head injuries? Is that possible? Head injuries that induce unconsciousness often have some effect on memory.  My brother got kicked in the head by a horse and drove home on his own. Problem was,  the parents had sold that house fifteen years earlier. Luckily,  the family there knew him and called both Mom and the paramedics,  who got to watch memories return in layers. It was fascinating; he initially still thought Ford was President,  when it was late in Clinton’s second term.

Contrast this with the stuff that turns up in material like the McMartin accusations…..Giraffes being sacrificed, plane rides, tunnels, Satanic altars…..This is the sort of stuff that put the West Memphis Three in jail for nearly twenty years,  because some people wanted to believe—-and I think this is significant——in almost comically evil villains. Of course those villains had to be Satanists.  I guess they didn’t want to believe in the banality of evil,  maybe because that’s what so many of them were themselves. Evil villains made them heroes—-and victims—-of the situation instead of just…whatever they were.  Boring ordinary villains made it really hard to tell the bad guys from the mediocre guys.

Another thing that makes me wonder, again based on experience, is how many of these claims happened along with head injuries? Is that possible? Head injuries that induce unconsciousness often have some effect on memory.

We do know that memory consolidation can be effected by injury to the brain, your brothers’ experience isn’t that unusual:

Retrograde amnesia (RA) is a loss of access to events that occurred, or information that was learned, before an injury or the onset of a disease.[1] RA is often temporally graded, consistent with Ribot’s Law. more recent memories closer to the traumatic incident are more likely to be forgotten than more remote memories.[2]

  The thing that arouses the most doubt about repressed memories and stuff like that is that memories—-especially the most unpleasant ones—-are persistent things.  They want to come out.  Giraffe sacrifices and Satanic rituals would leave rather a splash.

I remember reading about this one murder case where a woman named Paula Sims(I think)  claimed that her two baby daughters were abducted years apart in similar circumstances. In one case the guy supposedly gave her a karate chop that knocked her out.  The detectives instantly knew she was lying.

Someone who did wonderful work on the hysteria and prosecutorial misconduct on convictions based on repressed memories is Dorothy Rabinowitz.  No Crueler Tyrannies was excellent as was her reporting in the Wall Street Journal.

http://www.amazon.com/Crueler-Tyrannies-Street-Journal-ebook/dp/B000FC0SAK/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1325597429&sr=8-2

Brian Lamb did a decent interview with her on the old C-Span show Booknotes as well.

http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/175675-1/Dorothy+Rabinowitz.aspx

Its really blood curdling what the prosecutors, investigators, and social workers did to those people falsely accused.  One can’t nor should blame the children who had these memories put into their heads.

ginmar, that’s because if one sustains a concussion to the head that knocks one out, then the consolidation of memory can’t take place for the events lived just before the injury, and so she couldn’t have remembered her ‘assailant’ in the first place.

@50: You wouldn’t forget that your dad raped you for twenty years and then suddenly remember it in therapy, and you certainly wouldn’t forget it if it had happened every night for five years. Even if you remember absolutely nothing about the event, you are likely to remember it as a fact, like a sound bite.

I think it’s more complex than that. If you had asked me in 1991, when I was 20 and the incident was eight years in the past, if I had been sexually assaulted, I would have said no for two reasons. The first is that psychological denial had become an automatic reflex to me. The second was that at the time, I had no idea it could be called sexual assault or sexual abuse. It was, in the Sandusky euphemism, “roughhousing,” and it’s my problem for not taking it on the chin as part of adolescent socialization.

It wasn’t until I was dealing with an abusive relationship as an adult, that a therapist said to me, “that was rape.” (Even that process took several sessions of denial as I rationalized it as anything but rape.)  And about a year later, I realized, “if THIS was sexual assault, then THAT was also sexual assault.”

The human capacity to deny reality is incredibly deep. And if people can rewrite their beliefs to remember purely imaginary things, then people can rewrite their beliefs to believe that something never really happened. My family is dealing with belated grief and anger over the fact that for 25 years, we pretended that a sister never existed.

This is the perfect post to plop onto my local skeptics club’s community webpage to test their “empathetic” waters. If they don’t go ballistic shut-her-down on my ass, it might be nice to get more involved with them.

No response yet…

Poor Shirley Mason - she was apparently a child with an active imagination and artistic, but she was raised by a strict Seventh Day Adventist family.

Now this is interesting. Amanda (or anyone who’s read Nathan’s book), do you remember if the author points out the “invasive” similarity between MPS and demonic possession? (I shouldn’t have to add that, obviously, they are not the same thing in general). I ask because, as you’re probably aware, “cases” of possession in modern-day Europe and North America pretty much always occur in fundie families (not just church-going or “I believe in God and the devil” groups, but strict zealots of a much rarer stripe). There’s an intriguing thematic correlation between Mason’s family and the families of “possessed” kids.

Alara’s comment seems dead on to me.  Anecdote alert!  My sister was hit by a car when she was 17 and, amongst other things, knocked out.  She doesn’t remember the accident itself, but remembers events shortly before and afterwards, and sure as heck remembers that she was in fact, hit by a car.

CBrachyrhynchos - I think you have misunderstood what Alara was saying.  Your explanation of why you would not have remembered an event as rape/sexual assault makes perfect sense - but you still remember An Event, and named it something different.  And pretending that something didn’t happen/someone doesn’t exist still requires a conscious awareness of something to pretend isn’t something, if you see what I mean.  It doesn’t mean literally having no memory of it.

I haven’t really seen the evidence for the contention that trauma itself induces amnesia.

I see amnesia fairly regularly with the people I deliver to emergency rooms: they have no idea why the hell they’re there, and later on don’t remember the incident that required them to be there.

In all cases I can recall, however, there was a state of altered consciousness involved: it could have been from booze or drugs, head trauma, a pre-existing psychological condition, or some kind of physiological issue (such as an epilepsy). I never saw it from cases where someone was physically assaulted without a head injury or intoxicants, or had been in an serious accident, but again, had no head injury or intoxicants involved.

The other thing is that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone ever “recover” those memories. If they don’t remember the accident or getting the snot kicked out of them shortly thereafter, they never will remember the accident or the beating.

@65: *Puts on cognitive science hat.* I think I understand what Alara is saying, I just think it’s incomplete. There are (at least) two roads to “remembering” something. The short road is associative or triggered recall. The long road is reconstructive recall. The latter mechanism is trainable, requires work, and is reinforced by practice. This is the form of recall you exercise when you study for a test or play a trivia game. So for example, I’d have to work really hard to remember all the books of the Bible or how to perform a Gram stain because I’ve not exercised that information in years.

It’s this process that can be manipulated by lawyers and psychologists into accepting false information because it’s a creative and reconstructive process. And if this form of remembering can be manipulated in that way, it can be manipulated to shut down as well.

but you still remember An Event, and named it something different

That’s the point. I didn’t remember or name it. I trained myself quite well to just not think about what happened during those years beyond, “Middle school sucked, but I was really into Asimov, Tolkien and McCaffrey. Wouldn’t it be great to have a dragon?” Contrary to popular belief, you can train your mind not to think about elephants, it just requires dedication and daily practice.

Ultimately, I did start to deconstruct those coping mechanisms and explore the memories (along with the delayed emotional conflicts). But I needed to be in a safe and supportive place to do so, which I didn’t have until I was in my 20s. I think ginmar said it well above:

You can very successfully push memories away repeatedly till they vanish for long periods of time.

I haven’t really seen the evidence for the contention that trauma itself induces amnesia.

* laughs self silly *

I was born with a hole in my heart.  Which required relatively frequent hospital visits from 6 weeks until I had open heart surgery in 1979 at the age of two.  I imagine most visits were relatively…uneventful.  But then there were the times like the day that I threw a temper tantrum while nurses tried to put a catheter in me, resulting in blood spurting everywhere.  So.

Even once the surgery follow-up check-ups were done, I still had to see the cardiologist every year.  According to my mother, I was incapable of answering any questions about what happened during the exams until about the age of 12.  (And when she says incapable, I do believe her.  I tend to get pretty stubborn and mulish when the issue is that I consciously DO NOT WANT to do something; her assessment of my reaction is that I was more confused?...and was not able to process the question.)  Despite that, each time we went, I knew exactly what to do when we got there, when the doctors took the x-rays, etc.

And I can tell you that while I remember the hospital from those last two visits (about 11 to 13) I have absolutely no memory of any of the other visits.  Despite being able to remember all kinds of other significant recurring events - even from when I was fairly young.  I also know that my memory of those last two visits is…strange.  It was the weirdest sense of everything being familiar and yet not.  Like…knowing what something is but not being able to come up with what it is called.  Only…the entire place, every procedure was what I knew, and what I could not figure out was when or how I learned what any of it was.

Granted, I never recovered those memories, and likely never would - at least in full.  But…the last visit also felt different from the one before it.  While that may have just been that this was the first visit during which I could point to specific previous memories…(still relatively fuzzy though)...I do wonder if, now that my ability to access recent memories of that place had somehow been unlocked, if I would have eventually remembered anything from visits that happened when I was even younger - even if only in bits and pieces.

So, yeah.  Memories are weird.  Trauma can do really weird things to memory.  Especially when one is very young.  Like, under five young.

Repressed memories are not…outlandish in that sense.  It’s more, as you said, that it is clear from the specific cases that this is not what was going on in the nationally televised circuses.  Also, people are not that predictable?  That many kids would not react that exactly and specifically and similarly to even similar trauma.

I just bought the book on this thread’s say-so and it is a fucking page turner.  It really is a great read.

“The “lesbian” thing is particularly unnerving, as Dr. Wilbur was an avid homophobe who claimed that homosexuality was caused by domineering mothers. She really had an obsession with “domineering mothers”, a group that the mid-20th century seemed to believe encompassed all mothers.”

It’s been a few years, but I remember reading something in a Psych text that “domineering mothers” was a phony charge made by husbands in collusion with psychiatrists to warehouse perfectly sane wives in institutions while they paired off with someone else, gain access to their money/control of the family finances, etc.  Does this sound familiar to anyone?