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false-memory syndrome

  (fôls'mĕm'ə-rē)
n. (Abbr. FMS)

The belief that one remembers events, especially traumatic events, that have not actually occurred. Not in scientific use.


 
 
Occultism & Parapsychology Encyclopedia: False Memory Syndrome

False memory syndrome refers to a memory disorder in which the individual has come to believe fantasies, usually invoked during hypnotism or while undergoing psychotherapeutic counseling, are real. The term "false memory syndrome" has come to replace "survivor syndrome" or "incest survivor syndrome" as the name given the set of symptoms that led the individual to try hypnotism or therapy in the first place.

During the 1970s, two different but structurally similar stories began to be told by individuals. One story was related by individuals who claimed that at some point in the past they had been confronted by beings from outer space. They were taken aboard their spacecraft and physically examined. The examination was physically intrusive, personally embarrassing, and often painful. Afterward, they had no memory of what had occurred, though occasionally they had the sense that they had lost several hours of their life. One of the more famous cases concerned Barney and Betty Hill, who later under hypnosis told a very similar story of their abduction while driving home in the early morning hours on a New Hampshire highway. In some cases, such as the famous account by Whitley Strieber, further exploration revealed multiple accounts of abductions.

Then in the 1980s, beginning with the book Michelle Remembers (1980) by Michelle Smith, women began to emerge telling the story of their recovered memory of having been involved in a Satanic cult in their childhood. The stories claimed that parents were introducing their daughters into the cult and the child was being forced to participate in a variety of rituals and was sexually abused. After a period of time, usually a few years, the child was allowed to leave and continue her life as if nothing peculiar had ever happened to her. Their friends and peer group at school were never aware of their Satanic ritual abuse.

As the number of cases increased, their veracity was apparently bolstered by contemporary stories of children who were being forced into abusive situations with Satanic parents. The most famous case concerned the McMartin Dayschool in Manhattan Beach, California. Beginning from a single accusation of sexual abuse directed at one of the school's employees, the town's police chief sent out a letter to several hundred parents whose children were attending the school or had attended it in the past. The letter, leaked to the press, created a community-wide panic and eventually several hundred children were inter-viewed by psychologists, who diagnosed more than 300 as victims of abuse. During the interviews, as the story developed, it moved from a case of child abuse to a case of multiple child abuse to a case of ritual child abuse. A child questioned on a number of occasions would begin to agree with suggestions made by the psychologists and then elaborate on the story. Children told of being forced to participate in the making of child pornography movies, watching animal sacrifices, and being involved in Satanic rituals in an elaborate tunnel complex below the school. The accusations resulted in the longest criminal trial in California history and resulted in no convictions. However, the extended proceedings contributed greatly to the belief in the existence of widespread Satanism.

The stories of UFO abduction and Satanic ritual abuse grew up side by side but were rarely associated. The stories of abduction were initially pursued by UFO investigators, who were assisted by hypnotists. They were then joined by psychological professionals, some of whom had a prior interest in either UFOs or in past life therapy. They were also different from the Satanic cases in that the actual abduction event was ascribed to extraterrestrials and thus had no implications for law enforcement. The entities accused of doing what were unquestionably illegal acts were not available for arrest. Those who argued for the genuineness of the abductions had the additional task of convincing skeptics of the existence of UFOs.

Such was not the case with reports of Satanic abuse. While never a large phenomenon, Satanism undoubtedly existed. There were several quite public Satanist groups (such as the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set), and several incidents of small informal Satanist groups that had committed various violent acts, including murder. The more informal groups, whose existence was usually discovered when a crime was traced to them, also verified that Satanic groups were operating sub rosa in the society.

As the cases of Satanic ritual abuse multiplied, people were called out as the perpetrators of crimes, usually rape and/or child abuse. In the first cases, male parents were accused of abusing their now-grown daughter when she was a child. These were joined by ex-spouses accusing former mates who had retained custody of their children of abuse. Cases in which the accusation carried no occult content mixed with cases of ritual abuse. By the end of the 1980s the number of cases had grown into the thousands. From North America (the original case was Canadian), the idea migrated to the United Kingdom and Continental Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

The idea of Satanic ritual abuse rested upon a series of hypotheses that had been suggested by psychologists operating within the larger child protection movement that was attempting to ferret out cases of child abuse and change public perceptions about its widespread existence in the culture. At the beginning of modern psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud had noted the existence of suppressed memories. As early as 1978, psychologist Roland Summit had authored a paper suggesting that children should be believed when they told stories of abuse, no matter how incredible they sounded. The spread of this opinion among child psychologists led credence to accounts of Satanic abuse when they were told by children.

The existence of Satanic groups and the belief in the accusations of children that they had been involved in Satanic rituals, made the stories of adult women of childhood involvement in a Satanic cult highly believable to many, especially among conservative Christians possessed of a strong personal belief in the existence of the Devil. Through the 1980s, psychologists emerged who specialized in treating people with what were believed to be repressed memories of childhood involvement in a Satanic cult. At the same time, police who had an interest in occult-related crime began to offer professional training seminars on Satanic crimes. Several cities, such as Los Angeles, California, organized groups to study and make recommendations for action on Satanic cult activity.

By the end of the 1980s thousands of cases of Satanic ritual abuse had emerged and observers realized that society was entering a major state of panic about the existence of Satanic groups throughout the English-speaking world. The panic was becoming visible in the spread of popular literature advocating the growth of Satanism, the reallocating of law enforcement funds to investigate accusations of Satanic activity, and a series of civil and criminal court cases with individuals standing trial for events that reputedly occurred several decades earlier. The primary evidence in these cases was the recovered memory of the accusing offspring. Where actual court cases did not occur, many families were torn apart by adult children accusing their parents of abuse, breaking relations with them and asking their siblings to join them.

The accusations of ritual abuse had a variety of problems. As the number of cases multiplied, they described the existence of a vast underground Satanic network that had existed for several generations, yet, prior to the 1980s was completely unknown. Other stories that emerged through the 1980s described rituals and activities largely based upon and similar to those described by Michelle Smith in her book. Then, it was discovered that her book was a hoax and that the rituals had actually been copied from some traditional African practices. The discovery of the Michelle Smith hoax followed the discovery of several other fictionalized accounts being offered by other self-confessed survivors—most notably Lauren Stratford and Rebecca Brown.

Most importantly, in the early 1990s, a series of reports on the investigations of accusations of Satanic abuse concluded that investigators had been unable to find any collaborating evidence. The lack of hard evidence to verify either ritual abuse or the existence of the Satanic network has made most police departments very skeptical of further reports of Satanism.

In the early 1990s, psychologists, especially those who had been called upon to counsel parents who had been accused of abuse by their children based upon recovered memories, became concerned over the practice of recovered memory therapy by their colleagues. They encouraged the formation of parent support groups and in 1992 led in the formation of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. They proposed that the so-called survivors of ritual abuse were really suffering from a memory disorder that they termed the false memory syndrome. They suggested that recovered memory therapy was based upon a false understanding of memory and its malleability. Rather than recovering memories, they were by their therapy assisting their clients in the creation of false memories. Through the 1990s, a number of therapists whose patients had recovered memories of abuse and subsequently accused their parents of abuse, found themselves in court defending their actions.

The understanding of the false memory syndrome as it exists in Satanic cases has had a rebound affect on UFO abduction reports. Structurally they are very like the Satanic reports and like them, there is little collaborating hard evidence of the abduction accounts. In the wake of the action taken against therapists who promoted Satanic ritual abuse, psychologists have also criticized those of their colleagues who have championed therapy with UFO abductees as also generation of a false memory syndrome in their clients.

Sources:

Goldstein, E., and Kevin Farmer. Confabulations: Creating False Memories, Destroying Families. Boca Raton, Fla.: Upton Books, 1995.

Hicks, Robert. In Pursuit of Satan: The Police and the Occult. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1991.

Hochman, John. "Recovered Memory Therapy and False Memory Syndrome." Skeptic 2, 3 (1994): 58-61.

Loftus, Elizabeth, and Katherine Ketchum. The Myth of Repressed Memories: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.

Nathan, Debbie, and Michael Snedeker. Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt. New York: Basic Books, 1995.

 
Wikipedia: false memory


For the novel, see False Memory (novel)

A false memory is a memory of an event that did not happen or is a distortion of an event that did occur as determined by externally corroborated facts.

Background

It is common experience that memory may be unreliable to some degree. Our sense of identity, of who we are and what we have done, is tied to our memories, and it can be disturbing to have those challenged. Amnesia, Alzheimer's disease, and post-traumatic stress disorder (also known as “shell-shock”) provide examples of dramatic loss of memory, with devastating effects on the sufferer and those around them.

Memory is a complicated process, only partly understood, but research suggests that the qualities of a memory do not in and of themselves provide a reliable way to determine accuracy. For example, a vivid and detailed memory may be based upon inaccurate reconstruction of facts, or largely self-created impressions that appear to have actually occurred. Likewise, continuity of memory is no guarantee of truth, and disruption of memory is no guarantee of falsity. Finally, memory is a reconstructed phenomenon, and so it can often be strongly influenced by various biases, such as: subjective or social expectation, emotions, the implied beliefs of others, inappropriate interpretation, or desired outcome.

Discussion

If a person remembers an event that lacks another witness or corroborative physical evidence, due to lack of perfect accuracy in most memories, the validity of the memory may be questioned if it would have a significant impact on others. It might be said that absence of evidence does not in fact constitute the non-existence of evidence, but validation has high priority in such situations, such as courts of law or military situations. For instance, one might say that they have witnessed scores of an enemy army over the hillside. As difficult as it may be to disprove such a statement outright, the statement cannot be validated until the enemy army is actually validated by corroborating witnesses.

Complications arise when a memory involves trauma inflicted by another. If it is in a reputedly involved third party's interest to deny an incriminating memory, the memory cannot be dismissed merely on the strength of such a denial. Likewise, the memory alone does not warrant an accusation of the third party—hence need for external corroborative evidence.

The origin of false memories is controversial. Hypnosis can be used to form false memories because this technique can lead to fantasizing and can increase the subjective certainty of fantasy. Research suggests that at least some false memories are formed through rehearsal, or repetition, of an event that has been confirmed as fantastic: after repeatedly thinking about and visualizing an event, a person may begin to “remember” it as if it had actually occurred. Upon questioning, such a person might confidently recall the event when in fact it is merely previous visualizations that make it seem familiar. Rehearsal is the strongest mechanism of moving short-term memory into long-term memory. Naturally, the rehearsal of incorrect information leads to the formation of an incorrect long-term memory. This applies to both implanted and real memories. For example, many people have experienced the phenomenon of learning that a childhood memory actually happened to a sibling.

Research suggests that memory involves reconstruction, not just recall. For example, a child remembers standing beside a fence overlooking an eerie looking valley. As an adult, the real eerieness of the valley may be falsely remembered as containing a dead body, when in fact the child witnessed a homeless man sleeping under the trees. This particular memory would represent an inaccurate reconstruction.

Many proponents of recovered memories emphasize the importance of distinguishing between ordinary and traumatic memory. Studies show that memories can be implanted, but we lack studies on implanted traumatic memories and their related effects—such as post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociative identity disorder—because such studies would be unethical.

False memory syndrome

False memory syndrome (FMS) is the term for the hypothesis describing a state of mind wherein sufferers have a high number of highly vivid but false memories, often of abusive events during their childhood. This condition has been studied, and sufferers have confessed to “entirely made up stories.” However, the DSM-IV does not recognize FMS, although the forgetting of traumatic events constitutes several of the manual's diagnostic criteria for PTSD. The debate over FMS centers largely around the topic of child abuse, wherein alleged victims are said to experience dissociation, which causes repression of the traumatic memory until later in life, when the memory resurfaces either naturally or with the aid of a professional. Many advocates of FMS argue against both methods of memory recovery, claiming that such professionals as therapists and psychiatrists accidentally implant false memories. Specific therapies considered by some to be pseudoscientific (such as past lives therapies) have been explained with reference to false memory syndrome. The term and concept were popularized, though not invented, by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF).

The Courage to Heal is a book that has received much controversy over the years, as some believe it encourages the recovery of repressed memories as a healing technique. Some retractors have blamed the book for encouraging them into memory confabulation.[2]

Ultimately, it is undeniable that true memories are often forgotten. The difficulty comes in deciding whether a memory which has been recovered or spontaneously recollected, is accurate and correctly interpreted, or not. One example involves a small child whose videotaped rape became a national news story and eventually led to the arrest of her alleged perpetrator Chester Arthur Stiles in October of 2007. According to that girl's mother, the child, two years after the literally documented molestation has absolutely no memory of the assault.

Prominent examples

Murder

In July of 1978, 44 year old Mary Bowman died in her bedroom with large quantities of alcohol and valium in her system. Her daughter, five at the time, would recall 20 years later in 1998 that her father had abused both her and her mother when she was young. She also "recovered" memories of an assault on her mother that ended with her father force-feeding her pills and booze on the night of her death.

As charges were being filed, the investigation turned up evidence that the account given by the daughter was inconsistent (both in itself and with established facts of the original autopsy and body exhumation).[1] This case is one of many [2][3] where false memories led to murder accusations or formal charges.

Sexual abuse

False memory has figured prominently in many investigations and court cases, including cases of alleged sexual abuse. There is no scientific way to prove that any of these recollections are completely accurate.

In the United States, in the 1980s, a wave of false allegations spread as a result of the use of recovered memory techniques in cases of Satanic ritual abuse.[3] Hundreds of psychotherapists began teaching that adult stress was a sign that a person was sexually abused by their parents and neighbors. Using putative techniques to "recover" these lost memories, hundreds of people eventually were convinced by their therapists that they were abused by Satanic priests, these Satanists being their own family or kindergarten teachers. Hundreds of people were convicted of these "crimes" and put in jail. From the late 1990s onward a skeptical reappraisal of these recovered memory techniques has shown that these were not recovered memories at all, but rather created memories. Most of the people convicted on such charges have since been freed.[4]

During the 1980s, the popular news media reported on a series of similar high-profile cases in which allegations of organized sexual abuse were made against day care workers. Many people now believe these cases, many of which resulted in the eventual exoneration of the accused, comprise a historical period of moral panic, often referred to as day care sexual abuse hysteria. Some professionals argue that recovered memories and the use of hypnosis during interviews with children were instrumental in these allegations. However, some of these children, now adult, have come forth to acknowledge that they were in fact lying.

Additionally during the late 1990s, there were multiple lawsuits in the United State in which psychiatrists and psychologists were successfully sued, or settled out of court, on the charge of propagating iatrogenic memories of childhood sexual abuse, incest and satanic ritual abuse.[5] Bennet Braun, an Illinois psychiatrist is arguably the most well-known among psychotherapeutic professionals who were found negligient.

Some individuals who came to believe in things they later claimed did not happen have retracted allegations of such abuse (for instance, [6]). Dubbed "retractors" by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, these individuals are sometimes vilified as being "in denial" about the "real abuse they suffered and want to forget about" by advocates of recovered memory therapy (see below), a suggestion which some find offensive.[7]

Alien abduction and past life therapy

Other reputed instances of therapist-implanted false memory involve alien abductions and past life regression. These cases are cited as proof that certain methods can induce false memories.

Psychologist Stephen Jay Lynn conducted a simulated hypnosis experiment in 1994, asking patients to imagine they had seen bright lights and experienced lost time. 91% of subjects who had been primed with questions about UFOs stated that they had interacted with aliens. [8]

Harvard University professor Richard McNally has found that many Americans who believe they have been abducted by aliens share personality traits such as New Age beliefs and episodes of sleep paralysis accompanied by hypnopompic hallucinations. These experiences prompted the individuals to visit therapists, who would frequently suggest alien abduction as a cause. The individuals readily accepted the explanation and in laboratory experiments exhibited stress symptoms similar to those of Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.[9] The experiment led McNally to conclude, "Emotion does not prove the veracity of the interpretation."[10]

Criticisms of recovered memory therapy

Although there is genuine concern that important memories may be buried and need uncovering, there is concern that the goal of neutral truth may be forgotten, compared to the belief that they must exist and be found, and that lives are therefore devastated by the pressure to find such memories when such events often may not have happened, or may be misinterpreted.

Critics, such as FMS advocates, claim that recovered memory therapists often have a non-neutral interest in proving that such experiences happened, and use techniques similar to those used by cults and interrogators which are known to produce mental confusion such as:

  • keeping information from their clients that could place their recovered memories in doubt
  • assuming by default that repressed memories exist in the client
  • relying upon techniques based upon suggestibility rather than ones which neutrally explore the client's experience
  • mentally isolating people from their previous social support (families and so on)
  • viciously attacking opponents, insinuating that they are practitioners of Satanic ritual abuse or that they endorse the sexual abuse of children

Critics of recovered memory therapy, like Richard Ofshe, Ethan Watters (Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, And Sexual Hysteria) and Elizabeth Loftus (The Myth of Repressed Memory), view the practice of "recovering" memories as fraudulent and dangerous. They base this assertion on several claims:

  • Traumatic experiences which obviously have happened, such as war time experiences, are not "repressed"—they are either forgotten or remembered clearly in spite of attempts to suppress them.
  • The "memories" recovered in RMT are highly detailed. According to RMT literature, the human brain stores very vivid memories which can be recalled in detail, like a video tape. This belief contradicts virtually all research on the way memories work.
  • The patient is given very extensive lists of "symptoms" including sleeplessness, headaches, the feeling of being different from others etc. If several of these symptoms are found, the therapist suggests to the patient that they were probably sexually abused. If the patient denies this, they are "in denial" and require more extensive therapy. This is a form of Catch-22.
  • During the questioning, patients are openly encouraged to ignore their own feelings and memories and to assume that the abuse has happened. They then explore together with this therapist, over a prolonged period of many months or even years, how the abuse happened. The possibility that the abuse has not happened at all is usually not considered.

According to these critics, RMT techniques used for "reincarnation therapy" or "alien abduction therapy" are comparable to the techniques used in Satanic ritual abuse therapy. To verify the false memory hypothesis, researchers like Elizabeth Loftus have successfully produced false memories of various childhood incidents in test subjects. This is viewed by some as further evidence that false memories can be produced in therapy. Others believe that there is insufficient evidence that false memories can be created in therapy. [4] The false memories in these studies, however, are ordinary memory (like convincing people they were lost in a mall as a child) and not traumatic memories. It would be highly unethical to subject people to traumatic experiences for experimental purposes when studying traumatic memory.

Even when patients who have had therapy to recover 'memories' come to decide that their memories are in fact false (and so retract their claims), they can still suffer a kind of post traumatic stress. This is due to what some therapists call "brain stain". [5]

References

  1. ^ http://www.richardwebster.net/bowman.html
  2. ^ http://www.religioustolerance.org/rmt_reli.htm
  3. ^ http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/loftus.htm
  4. ^ Brown, Scheflin and Hammond (1998) . Memory, Trauma Treatment, And the Law (W. W. Norton) ISBN 0-393-70254-5
  5. ^ Kelly Lambert and Scott O. Lilienfeld, [1], 'Scientific American Mind', Oct 2007.
  • Amos, Jonathan. "Alien 'abductees' show real symptoms", BBC News, 2003-2-18. Retrieved on 2005-12-26. 
  • Ceci, S.J., Huffman, M.L.C., Smith, E., & Loftus, E.F. (1994) Repeatedly thinking about non-events. Consciousness and Cognition, 3, 388-407.
  • Hyman, I.E., Husband, T.H., & Billings, F.J. (1995) False memories of childhood experiences. Applied Cognitive Psychology 9, 181-197.
  • Loftus, E. & Ketcham, K. The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse, St. Martin's Griffin, 1996. ISBN 978-0312141233.
  • Ofshe, Richard and Watters, Ethan Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994
  • Pendergrast, Mark. Victims of Memory: Incest Accusations and Shattered Lives, Upper Access,Inc, 1995. ISBN 0-942679-16-4.
  • Perina, Kaja. "Alien Abductions: The Real Deal?", Psychology Today, March/April 2003. Retrieved on 2005-12-26. 
  • Roediger, H.L. & McDermott, K.B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words that were not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition. 21, 803-814. Full Text (PDF).

See also

External links and references

"Occasional unwitting misleading suggestions (Yapko, 1994a), even the suggestion of a diagnosis of abuse, cannot adequately explain illusory memories of child sexual abuse."
"The hypothesis that false memories can easily be implanted in psychotherapy (Lindsay & Read, 1994; Loftus 1993; Loftus & Ketcham, 1994; Ofshe and Watters, 1993, 1994; Yapko, 1994a) seriously overstates the available data. Since no studies have been conducted on suggested effects in psychotherapy per se, the idea of iatrogenic suggestion of false memories remains an untested hypothesis."
Although the science is limited on this issue, the only three relevant studies conclude that repressed memories are no more and no less accurate than continuous memories (Dalenberg, 1996; Widom and Morris, 1997; Williams, 1995). Thus, courts and therapists should consider repressed memories no differently than they consider ordinary memories.

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Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Occultism & Parapsychology Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology. Copyright © 2001 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "False memory".  Read more

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