Recovered Memories: Can We Tell? article by Dr. Katherine Ramsland, in Web Mystery Magazine, Summer 2005

In Manhattan Beach, California, Virginia McMartin ran a daycare center with several members of her family. In 1983, Judy Johnson left her son there and later apparently found something wrong with him that she attributed to abuse. It later came out that Johnson suffered from delusions and hallucinations, but before this discovery, the police had begun an investigation that involved alerting parents of children enrolled in the center. Although the children initially denied that anything had ever happened to them there, they were put into therapy with social workers who diagnosed abuse “symptoms.” Recovering memories of that abuse became their primary agenda. At the time, recovered memories were believed reliable.

Under the influence of the resulting hysteria (which also occurred in other places as well around the country), District Attorney Philobosian actually stated that the McMartin's school's primary purpose was to procure young children for adult pleasures, and one of his assistants insisted that a large number of pornographic photographs taken at the school existed. However, no one produced them. The FBI got involved, but those agents could find no such evidence, either. Yet in the end, 360 children were diagnosed as having been abused at the McMartin preschool, which resulted in the longest and most expensive legal proceeding in American history to that point. With no evidence against him, counselor Ray McMartin remained in jail five years before he was finally released on bail. After seven years from the initial accusations and endless heartache to the defendants (whose lives were all ruined), no one was convicted. The method employed by the social workers to “refresh” the children’s memories of abuse was controversial and based on a naïve understanding of the way the human mind works. It was certainly not scientific or supported by research.

The idea that memories of real events could be recovered derives from Sigmund Freud’s ideas about trauma and repression. Add to that the notion that people may deal with overwhelming childhood trauma (or terribly disturbing thoughts) by fragmenting into “alter” personalities, which was popularized by such cases as “Eve” during the 1950s and “Sybil” in the 1970s. By the 1980s, even more cases of multiple personality disorder (MPD) were being diagnosed, and recovered memories were a central feature.

Often those who suffer from MPD, say advocates, do not even realize it. The condition is commonly diagnosed through recovered memory therapy, in which the patient is found to have repressed trauma. Experts on this personality disturbance say that a hidden memory may emerge in depression, numbness, hypersensitivity, and over-reactions to certain environmental triggers. Sufferers may also experience vague flashbacks, or the memory might recur spontaneously many years after the incident. These people may "trance out," feel out of touch with reality, and experience sudden panic attacks. They may also have eating disorders, be abusive to others or themselves, or acquire serious addictions.

A mental health practitioner trying to determine whether this disorder is present would begin with a clinical interview to check if there are memories of childhood abuse or stretches of time that the subject cannot recall. The questions include ways to assess the presence of the array of MPD symptoms, and some type of structured diagnostic test or way to get corroborating information might be utilized. While other personalities can be elicited through hypnosis, it's also possible to hypnotically affect a suggestible person in such a way that they will act as if they have different personalities — especially if they have something to gain. In fact, some critics insist that alter personalities are nothing more then social constructs, suggested by a therapist to a vulnerable patient and supported by the social milieu. In short, there is no clear consensus among professionals on the disorder.

Thanks to that, and to what happened at the pre-schools, a panic ensued regarding recovered memories and child abuse that lasted from around 1982 until 1995. Children all over the country were subjected to repressed memory techniques, which ranged from manipulation via rewards to role playing with genitally-correct dolls to planted suggestions about what they had experienced. Many of the children went along to please the adults, although some of their allegations about digging up corpses, having their nipples pierced, and playing with Martians were completely absurd.

Nevertheless, adults accepted every detail and many innocent people went to prison. (Even today, some of the people sent to prison are still there, and a few high-profile cases have been investigated, bringing important questions to bear on how such people were convicted.) Richard McNally, a Harvard psychology professor, documents and debunks it all in Remembering Trauma. He describes the damage done by overzealous therapists and social workers, who planted ideas, pressured patients, and accepted any response as genuine manifestations. Psychotherapists relied on hypnosis, guided imagery, dream analysis, and other techniques to persuade mostly female clients to “remember” childhood abuse.

In 1990, a case that went to court had a significant effect in dividing professionals on the issue of just how reliable these techniques and their products were. Based on only a recovered memory, Eileen Franklin accused her father, George Franklin, of raping and murdering her best friend when they were both only children, some two decades earlier. She was absolutely certain that it had occurred and her friend, indeed, had been found murdered. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus testified on the father’s behalf that there were serious flaws in memory processes, and that as vivid as it may seem to Eileen, she could be mistaken. Memory, Loftus said, is a reconstructive process, and the mind easily blends fact with fiction. Even if Eileen believes she “saw” the rock as her father lifted it to pummel the other child, she could have added that image through the recovery process or from reading newspapers. The mind likes to fill in gaps and is susceptible to suggestion; thus a “memory” can be a distortion of actual experience. The jury didn’t accept it, and they convicted George Franklin. (Later, when Eileen admitted to having relied on hypnosis, an appeals court vacated the conviction.)

Loftus, incensed, threw herself into proving that the techniques of recovered memory therapy could actually plant false memories, or at least add details that were not actually true. She became the premier researcher in the country to show just how unreliable memory can be – including and especially “recovered” memories - no matter how confident is the person who reports it. She did experiments in which 25% of the participants did indeed include fictional images of events in their recall repertoire, and other researchers who came up with experiments of their own got significant numbers as well. But they could not ethically induce actual trauma, so recovered memory professionals claimed that their results weren’t generalizable to the abused population. Yet one researcher, Steve Porter, did induce false memories of vicious animal attacks, and half of his subjects accepted it.

During that era, nevertheless, recovered memory therapy was popular and patients were told that symptoms like forgetfulness, daydreaming, and inner arguments were subtle indicators of MPD, and therefore of forgotten abuse. Some books stated that one-third of all women had suffered this. Many fathers, stepfathers, and uncles were subsequently accused and some were convicted. People turned up dozens, hundreds, even a thousand alters, some of which weren’t even human, as documented by Joan Acocella in a 1998 New Yorker piece. And it wasn’t just run-of-the-mill abuse they were reporting, but organized satanic ritual abuse. Whole businesses sprang up and flourished, with book publishers, convention promoters, group therapists, individual therapists, national organizations, and hospitals benefiting. (McNally makes a point of stating that when insurance ran out, such people were either “cured” or let go.)

“Traumatologists” made a name for themselves, going to court as expert witnesses and offering self-help books that suggested that almost anyone could be the victim of child abuse and therefore have hidden personalities that they had long denied. This movement swept the country, as documented in Dr. Elaine Showalter’s Hystories, and increasingly more people sought a diagnosis of MPD to explain their troubles. Therapists would even advocate this as a necessary part of the treatment.

But then during the early to mid-1990s there was a backlash, fueled in part by the Franklin case. One accused father and his wife researched the experiments that were planting memories, and with this professional support they formed an organization for falsely accused relatives. They relabeled MPD as false memory syndrome, and they set up a professional advisory board to affirm the problems with assumptions made by leaders of the MPD movement. This organization was instrumental in overturning some convictions and urging courts to reconsider memory alone as evidence of criminal conduct. Then as the media turned against the recovered memory movement, many patients retracted their claims or were proven by their victims to have made false allegations.

But too late for Paul Ingram, in Olympia, Washington, who was convinced by people who believed in recovered memory techniques to confess to abusing his daughters and to participating in a satanic cult. Yet his confessions also contained incidents that had never occurred, planted by sociologist and memory expert, Paul Ofshe. He believed that Ingram was a highly suggestible man who had participated in a hypnotically-induced story creation, and that he was innocent. But Ingram himself did not wake up to that until he was already in prison.

In defense, many therapists who used the methods contended that critics misunderstood and that actual professional misconduct was rare, but they could not stop the wave of revolt by patients who felt betrayed. Nor could they stop the formation of legal guidelines that insisted there be some form of corroboration for the alleged memories.

Around the same time as false memory syndrome was being theorized, some people in therapy were discovering that their MPD narratives were similar to that of others, and they spotted a scam. They sued their therapists and juries sometimes awarded significant damages. In one case in Illinois, Dr. Bennett Braun had used repressed memory therapy to convince a patient that she had abused her children, was the cannibal high priestess of a satanic cult. His license to practice was suspended and a settlement by insurance companies for him and several other therapists awarded her $10.6 million.

McNally analyzed the research and determined that trauma memories are no different neurologically than normal memories, and that standard memory retrieval methods are problematic. (There are chemical substrates in the brain for both forgetting and remembering, according to work done by Eric Kandel, but that would not preclude the potential for memories to be corruptible, nor necessarily translate awareness of abuse into a void.) “Events that trigger overwhelming terror are memorable,” McNally states. Unless a person experienced a physical shock to the brain, was younger than two, or suffered some extreme physical demands such as starvation, traumatic experiences are generally remembered more clearly than ordinary ones. The inability to recall a memory, he believes, is no indicator of trauma and repression but more likely a signal that no such experience happened. If it cognitively registered at all, it should be available to retrieval without the use of trance-induction or drugs.

Among mental health professionals, the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID) is now the name given in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition (1994) for what used to be called multiple personality disorder (added to the DSM-III in 1980). There is probably no greater divide in the professional world than that regarding the authenticity and diagnosis of this disorder. Opinions range from those who insist there is no such phenomenon to those who believe every reported case is genuine and we’ve not even begun to uncover them all. In part, the disagreement centers on the more foundational issue of repressed and recovered memory of trauma, which itself has moved through different fads.

In addition, several rapists and murders have used the disorder for an insanity defense, and more than one has been caught malingering (as depicted in the film, Primal Fear). It’s not that hard to fake. With the absence of reliable objective assessments, trauma sufferers who actually develop DID and use it as an excuse in the courtroom are no different, legally speaking, from those who claim the have repressed memories of alien abduction. How can we tell what’s actually true? Some juries have decided that no proof, aside from professional opinion, is necessary. But that’s changing.

To decide whether this disorder may indeed have a biological basis, rather than being an artifact of the ideas within a given society, there ought to be evidence of it in different cultures — those cultures that have not been exposed to the literature and spokespeople of the past MPD movement. There ought also to be evidence throughout history — and not just speculative evidence that a phenomenon such as demonic possession must have been multiple personality disorder. In other words, we must take care not to offer a presentation of a syndrome as “objective and factual,” and a technique as reliable, when the results can potentially be influenced by the needs of certain culture-bound medical practices and social narratives. The validity of the theory that underscores both recovered memories and dissociative identity must be scientifically verified.

Some mental disorders are interactive with a culture and at least some of the ideas about MPD/DID appear to be among them. Indeed, as therapists backed off in the wake of scandal and lawsuits, the epidemic number of cases dwindled.

Perhaps the most important issue for the legal system is to adopt an attitude of balanced skepticism that neither accepts professional opinion on this issue at face value nor denies outright a defendant’s self-report. In that case, corroborating evidence would become key to the proceedings — a family’s reluctance to comply notwithstanding. In the case of accusations against aggressors, genuine evidence should prevail, as required in other types of criminal cases. In the case of those who are defending themselves with the diagnosis, claiming lack of awareness or responsibility, then a psychiatric history or testimony from those familiar with the person before his or her crime should be found and utilized — with stronger evidence than mere episodes of forgetfulness.

In sum, whether or not recovered memory therapy can actually dislodge memories of genuine experience of trauma that appear to be stuck inside someone’s psyche, it ought to receive better objective analysis and support from the professional community before therapists make claims for its benefits.