REPRESSED MEMORY:
Junk Science in the Courts
by Paul and Shirley Eberle

© 1997 by Paul and Shirley Eberle                                                                                                                                                             Illustration by Nick Bougas

Barbara (not her real name) was stressed out. Everything in her life was going badly. Her marriage had failed, her job was a nightmare. She wasn’t feeling well. But she had medical insurance. Barbara was told of a facility where the kind of difficulties she was experiencing were cured.

Barbara checked herself into the facility. Her psychiatrist sternly told her that all of her distress had been caused by incestuous childhood sexual abuse, and that she must remember being raped by her father before she would be well. She was isolated from the outside world, drugged, surrounded by patients who spoke of nothing but incestuous childhood sexual abuse. There was overpowering pressure to ‘remember,’ to scream out her rage and act out by throwing and smashing things.

"Dr. Smith is an expert. He can cure anything."

"He will make you well. Trust him."

Barbara checked herself into the facility. Her psychiatrist sternly told her that all of her distress had been caused by incestuous childhood sexual abuse, and that she must remember being raped by her father before she would be well. She was isolated from the outside world, drugged, surrounded by patients who spoke of nothing but incestuous childhood sexual abuse. There was overpowering pressure to "remember," to scream out her rage and act out by throwing and smashing things. Those who engaged in this behavior were rewarded with glowing approval. Those who did not were ignored. Barbara was in a very vulnerable state already. Now, surrounded by the hard-eyed custodians of fanaticism with their all-consuming obsession with incest, she searched desperately for memories of childhood rape, which just weren’t there. "Gradually," she said, "I lost the ability to think for myself."

Barbara observed that she and all of her fellow patients were not getting well but were getting much worse, descending into a downward spiral of paranoia and psychotic experiences. Some attempted suicide and self-mutilation. What they suffered before entering the hospital was nothing when compared to the damage done to them by the psychiatrists. After intense brainwashing sessions Barbara broke down. She had difficulty speaking coherently. Her psychiatrist had given her not one but several mind-altering drugs. When Barbara tried to check herself out of the hospital she was seized by orderlies, thrown into a padded cell and given more drugs. She began to understand that she was not going to be allowed to leave this locked facility until she declared that her father had raped her when she was an infant. Barbara complied. She was ordered to put her lurid accusations in writing. Her parents were summoned to the hospital and confronted with the letter. Naturally, they were crushed. They did not know what to say. They just wept. Nothing had prepared them for this.

A new wave of unreliable allegations of child sexual abuse has been sweeping over the nation during the past several years, causing incalculable pain and tragedy for families all over the United States and Canada. In a very short time it has become a billion-dollar industry for therapists, clinics, lecturers, authors, publishers and self-proclaimed gurus. It is one of the most bizarre and cruel quackeries of all time.

After Barbara was finally released she began to understand that she had been deluded. When she recanted, her psychiatrist urged her husband to divorce her and told him that she was an incurable drug addict ¾ this in spite of the fact that the only drugs Barbara took were the drugs he had prescribed.

Barbara apologized to her parents, who forgave her. She was one of the lucky few.

All of this was some bizarre anomaly, a well-intentioned, bumbling effort by an otherwise efficacious, honorable profession ¾ right?

Well, not really. A new wave of unreliable allegations of child sexual abuse has been sweeping over the nation during the past several years, causing incalculable pain and tragedy for families all over the United States and Canada. In a very short time it has become a billion-dollar industry for therapists, clinics, lecturers, authors, publishers and self-proclaimed gurus. It is one of the most bizarre and cruel quackeries of all time.

In the new "Repressed Memory Therapy," thousands of women have gone to psychiatrists, psychologists and other clinicians in search of cures for such commonplace discomforts as bulimia, nail biting, depression, headaches, stress, insomnia, a failing marriage, a job from which they are getting nothing but numbing servitude, a sense that something important is missing, an absence of any meaning or joy or direction in their lives, nothing to look forward to: the kind of malaise that nearly everybody experiences at some time.

But they come out of this "therapy" believing that they have been sexually abused by their parents, usually the father, in satanic blood-drinking rituals. Many have been convinced that they have multiple personalities. They are told by their therapists that they must break off all contact with their parents and make vile, horrifying accusations against them, and cut off all contact with other family members who do not believe. This protects the therapist and reinforces the beliefs. The patient moves, gets an unlisted telephone number, and all gifts from her parents are returned, unopened. These therapists almost invariably refuse to speak with the parents. The patients are mostly women. They have been told that these psychotherapists are "experts" who will make their lives whole. They are not told that what they have been indoctrinated into believing is without any evidential or scientific support. What happened to "Barbara" is so prototypical of this brand of "therapy" that you could delete her name and substitute any of thousands of other names in its place and the psychiatric abuse she suffered would differ only in the most trivial details from the others. It’s all played from the same script.

In one case with which we are familiar, a 32-year-old woman who had been bulimic for 22 years decided to do something about it. She went to a therapist who sat and stared at her for a couple of sessions and then began to talk more and more about incest. He diagnosed her as having been sexually abused as a child. He told her that her mother wanted to kill her. This woman worked for the Houston Police Department. She neglected her daughter and nearly everything else in her life. She spent all of her money on therapy, nearly lost her house and her job. Finally, she was hospitalized and fed a great multiplicity of pills. She tried to commit suicide. Her therapist put her in a group where there was powerful peer pressure to conform, and to say she was sexually abused. This group became her family ¾ her only family. She became so ill that she nearly lost her job. She decided to get a new therapist. This one was more reality-based. She still had her bulimia and she had indeed been molested by a stranger, but these things had never been addressed by her former therapist who talked only about incest. Even the cops with whom she worked tried to tell her that this was a misuse of therapy.

After some time in therapy with her new psychologist she became so angry that she sued the first therapist and collected a very substantial settlement. This was a ground-breaking case. She got enough money to keep her house, and also renewed her relationship with her mother and her family.

Most of the victims of this "therapy" are not so fortunate. Most people, once they become ideologues, block out anything that might persuade them to reexamine their beliefs.

What, exactly, is repressed memory therapy? An adult ¾ almost always female ¾ goes to a therapist and is told that her eating disorder, her failing marriage or depression stems from incestuous childhood sexual abuse, usually at the hands of the father. Using powerful mind-altering techniques (which, to all but the strongest and most sophisticated, would be irresistible and above suspicion), stringent, relentless pressure is applied, not only by the therapist but also by her group of converts, to break the patient down and make her "remember." This, the patient is told, will make her well. It is well known that many people are extremely susceptible to this kind of pressure and suggestion ¾ particularly when they are frightened and desperate ¾ when under the influence of hypnosis and drugs, an "expert," and overpowering group pressure; many of them actually begin to believe they are remembering an event that is nothing more than a suggestion or a visualization. It is also well known that all memory is distorted by any number of influences, both internal and external, and the erosion of time.

Of the children who testified as alleged victims in the celebrated McMartin case, several attended the preschool at a time when the defendant was living 100 miles away in San Diego. Yet, some gave extremely detailed descriptions of the molestations and the surroundings. Apparently they had come to believe that these events actually occurred. They were assured by everyone in the community that it was true: all the authority figures, all the people they needed, feared and trusted. And they were put through a powerful process of persuasion at Children’s Institute International, a clinic in downtown Los Angeles that received several million dollars in government grants. But the stories changed each time the children testified; no two children described the same event, and most of the events they described were demonstrably impossible.

Memory can indeed be distorted and false memory implanted. That does not deter these apostles of New Age brainwashing. When the insurance money is depleted the patient is told to sue her parents and file criminal charges against them, divesting them of all their assets and dropping them into the maw of a system that incarcerates the innocent and gives immunity to perjurers, particularly in cases of alleged child abuse. In McMartin the star witness for the prosecution was a career criminal who had an open rape/murder charge hanging over him. Might that have influenced his testimony?

When the insurance money is depleted the patient is told to sue her parents and file criminal charges against them, divesting them of all their assets and dropping them into the maw of a system that incarcerates the innocent and gives immunity to perjurers, particularly in cases of alleged child abuse. In McMartin the star witness for the prosecution was a career criminal who had an open rape/murder charge hanging over him.

In many cases adult daughters have tried to put their parents in prison. In the Sousa case in Boston a 65-year-old couple are facing a sentence that would put them in prison for the rest of their lives. They are under house arrest pending the outcome of their appeal.

One woman went to visit her father as he lay dying in a hospital and spewed out her hate and her revolting accusations at him. She was not the only one.

Many of these women came out of the therapy claiming that they were brutally raped every day from the time they were born until adulthood. Others said it started when they were six months old. None of them remembered anything of these events until they received enlightenment from the psychologist. Can you remember anything that happened when you were six months old? At least one young woman told the news media she was raped in the womb, before her birth.

In 1994 there were 6,000 civil lawsuits filed by adult daughters against their parents based on this voodoo psychology. We don’t know how many criminal charges have been filed, but there are too many to count. The first was the case of George Franklin, a California man who was convicted on the "recovered memory" testimony of his daughter, Eileen. Last year, his conviction was overturned by an appellate court. Dr. Richard Ofshe, a noted psychologist who was retained to study the case, said, "There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that he was anything but innocent." But Franklin spent six and a half years in prison looking at the world from an iron cage. When a federal court affirmed the ruling which vacated Franklin’s conviction, the prosecutors did not release him but kept him in custody for months, zealously asserting that he was not innocent and that they intended to retry him. Finally, they admitted that the evidence to convict wasn’t there. Prosecutors do not enjoy confessing that they have put a person in prison for six and a half years for a crime he did not commit.

Many of these women came out of the therapy claiming that they were brutally raped every day from the time they were born until adulthood. Others said it started when they were six months old. None of them remembered anything of these events until they received enlightenment from the psych-ologist. At least one young woman told the news media that she was raped in the womb, before her birth.

When Franklin was finally released in early July, 1996, prosecutors, members of the repressed memory industry, and radical feminist leaders bemoaned this tragic defeat.

Since then, there have been a number of legal victories for patients and their parents who sued the therapists. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge recently dismissed criminal charges against a father which were based on repressed memory, calling it "junk science." One of the most dramatic victories was that of Gary Ramona, who sued a psychiatrist and one of his colleagues who provided Ramona’s daughter with this "therapy." Ramona won a judgment of $500,000 but he lost much more that that. He paid that much for legal counsel and expert witnesses. When his daughter went public with her accusations he lost his $500,000-per-year job as manager of a winery. His wife immediately divorced him and nobody would speak to him or be seen with him in the town where he had once been a most respected citizen.

Bereaved parents, stunned by the brutal ingratitude of daughters on whom they have lavished their love and their assets in order to provide them with college educations, have formed groups in nearly every city to share new information and expose this quackery in the hope of getting their families back together. The repressed memory "experts" have counterattacked by calling these people "the backlash," "a group of molesters," and "Satanists." When you attempt to dissect, examine and expose a fraud that has mutated into a fanatical ideology and a staggeringly lucrative industry, you can expect to get some heat.

Many parents tearfully pray for the reunification of their families, despite the vile accusations. Others are more realistic. One father, a brilliant scientist, appeared in court for a hearing on a petition to terminate his parental rights and to respond to incest accusations from his teenage daughters. He dispassionately told the judge, "There is no dispute. I don’t want them back. I don’t ever want to see them again."

We have lectured at conferences and seminars in which this subject was discussed. Afterward, many middle-aged women approached us and sadly told us, "My husband is in prison on repressed memory accusations. I don’t know if he’ll ever get out." We saw their tears and their pain. There have been enough horror stories to fill a library, almost too much for one person to read. There are two excellent books available, Confabulations and True Stories of False Memory, by Eleanor Goldstein and Kevin Farmer. Any library with a computer can provide you with a very complete bibliography of books authored by people on both sides of this issue, plus many articles and papers.

The consequences to these families have been devastating. The cruelty is truly mind-boggling. But the consequences to the practitioners have been enormous, staggering fees from insurance companies, clients and their parents. It is not uncommon for a therapist to receive several hundred thousand dollars in fees for providing this nostrum to one patient.

Typically, these patients are put in therapy groups in order to further break them down. In group, they are encouraged to scream epithets at their parents and batter Mom and Dad, using dolls and other effigies. Patients are told:

If you sue your parents and file criminal charges against them, causing them to become indigent and spend the rest of their lives in prison, you will be made well and live happily forever after.
This system of therapy has its roots in Freud’s seduction theory and even earlier fables. The theory of repression for years was accepted as an article of faith by psychiatrists and psychologists alike. But after nearly a century of studies and experiments, the leading experts in memory have concluded that evidence of repression does not exist. We know of no survivor of the Holocaust, or of Vietnam, who totally forgot the experience, then recovered it in a therapy session. Dr. Richard Ofshe, a professor of psychology at the University of California and a leading expert on memory and coercion, stated in a lecture that Repressed Memory Therapy is "the worst fraud of the Twentieth Century." He further stated that the incidence of cases in which repressed memories correspond with fact is about as common as Siamese twins joined at the head.

The media were quick to seize upon this bizarre phenomenon in their desperate race to attract audiences and compete for advertising revenue. Newspapers and television freak shows eagerly trumpeted these urban legends to an unwary public. Women claiming to be in possession of dozens ¾ even hundreds ¾ of multiple personalities were presented to us on television on a daily basis in a setting reminiscent of P.T. Barnum.

The media were quick to seize upon this bizarre phenomenon in their desperate race to attract audiences and compete for advertising revenue. Newspapers and television freak shows eagerly trumpeted these urban legends to an unwary public. Women claiming to be in possession of dozens ¾ even hundreds ¾ of multiple personalities were presented to us on television on a daily basis in a setting reminiscent of P.T. Barnum.

Most of the people out there believed it. They didn’t get it from a seedy purveyor of diabolical conspiracy theories in an occult bookstore. It came to them from the heart of the United States government, the mainstream news media, liberal politicians, radical feminist celebrities, doctors, psychiatrists, professors, cops, district attorneys and attorneys general.

Ambitious, self-serving politicians have enacted laws which abrogate the statute of limitations that normally applies to child abuse. Now in about half the states, the statute of limitations runs from the time the alleged victim had her miraculous flashback. Incredibly, that great guardian of our constitutional rights, the A.C.L.U., has lobbied for the passage of these bills. It is, after all, a radical feminist agenda: hatred of the family, and particularly of the father. Feminist leaders have zealously embraced the repressed memory ideology as evidence of the depravity of the human male, and powerfully indoctrinated their communicants with this madness. Sadly, many women who turned to feminist leaders in search of greater freedom and equality merely exchanged a male bully for another kind of tyrant.

Nearly every large bookstore has a voluminous section labeled "RECOVERY." These sections are filled with books that preach the ideology of the Recovered Memory movement. Patients are strongly urged by their therapists to read these books which proclaim the horrors of the traditional family, hatred of the father, and the cosmic joys of lesbianism.

How did all this get started? Therapy ¾ particularly that of the "New Age" variety ¾ has become increasingly popular in the past twenty years. According to U.S. News, about 80 percent of the yuppie generation devoutly believes in the efficacy of therapy. They are apparently unaware that psychotherapy is an inexact science, even in the hands of a board-certified psychiatrist, to say nothing of scientifically illiterate M.F.C.C.s, M.S.W.s and all of those persons providing "therapy" who have nothing more than a B.A. in Theater Arts, or Business.

In 1974, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), also known as the Mondale Act, was passed by the Congress, providing enormous funding for those who were willing to work in the field of "intervention in child abuse." Suddenly, the nation was flooded with Child Abuse Units, Child Abuse Clinics, and self-ordained child abuse experts. It was America’s biggest growth industry. Congress addressed the problem of child abuse by throwing money at it without establishing any standards of professional competence or ethical conduct.

The consequences to these families have been devastating. The cruelty is truly mind-boggling. But the consequences to the practitioners have been enormous, staggering fees from insurance companies, clients and their parents. It is not uncommon for a therapist to receive several hundred thousand dollars in fees for providing this nostrum to one patient.

As a natural consequence, thousands of young people, mostly women, went into the field of psychology and obtained Ph.D.s, M.F.C.C.s and other credentials that would enable them to deal themselves into this game. Colleges and universities began pumping out Ph.D.s at an alarming rate. As the numbers of new therapists burgeoned, new "disorders" and "syndromes" began to proliferate. As the numbers of psychotherapists increased, the quality of their scientific training declined. Like their ecclesiastical predecessors, what these New Age priests imparted was more ideology than science. There is also the fact that it is easy. A heart surgeon, if he makes one mistake, will probably kill his patient. A clinical psychologist can get away with any number of errors and provide his client with a program of "treatment" that has absolutely no scientific basis.

At some point in time we are going to look into the qualifications and ethics of these therapists. The Hippocratic Oath enjoins the healer to "do no harm." These people are doing great harm. It is quackery that has spun out of control. Not one practitioner of this New Age panacea has expressed any regret or contrition.

In many states there are no requirements that must be met before a person can hang out a sign and offer himself/herself as a psychologist. Even in states where there are licensing requirements, the profession has done little or nothing to restrain the excesses of irresponsible, incompetent psychologists. A man who went to the Colorado State Legislature and told a legislative committee about this scandal was received with perfunctory courtesy and the usual platitudes: "You may be sure that we are deeply concerned about the issues you have raised today and you may be sure..."

After the committee adjourned the lawmakers told him privately in the hallway: "We know that everything you say is true but if we say one word about it our careers would be finished."

Shortly after the passage of the Mondale Act, we began reading headlines in the media that sexual abuse of children was increasing at astronomical proportions, that there was a worldwide secret society of sexual predators lurking, waiting to pounce on your child. We were told that all allegations of child sexual abuse must be believed, no matter how unfounded, no matter how physically impossible. It was a thinly disguised pitch for more money. As one lawyer who specializes in child-abuse cases told us, "It’s not about child-abuse. It’s about money. In order to get all this money the child abuse people have to generate cases! They are inflating their statistics! They are fabricating these cases."

At this time there was a tidal wave of child sexual abuse allegations against day-care facilities, with hundreds of counts and multiple defendants in a single case. Many people were sent to prison with sentences that would keep them there for the rest of their lives. Gradually, these cases began to fall apart. Several big cases have been overturned on appeal. Others appear to be inexorably on their way to reversal. As the day-care cases began to crumble, the child-abuse industry found a lucrative new market: adult survivors of incest.

How is it possible that a nation of presumably literate, reasonable people could buy into such an idiotic belief, relinquish control of their lives to a stranger, hand over the keys to their psyches to a therapist who is drunk with power and greed, and leave behind all critical judgment and any ethical principles or filial loyalty they might have had? This belief was not presented to them as a hypothesis. It came from people who had the imprimatur of authority, people with advanced degrees and titles, accompanied by a massive media-hype campaign. And there may be millions who are not capable of processing such a complicated issue. But even highly intelligent people, in a time of great social change and instability, fear, insecurity, chaos and the absence of any responsible leadership, can be sold almost anything if the seller is sufficiently persuasive. Therapy has become a religion.

In times like these, more than ever, people hunger for certainties. They are powerfully drawn to a person who claims to have the key, the secret, the power to make their lives whole. People who make such claims are almost invariably charlatans. As one of the defense attorneys in McMartin said, "Look a little closer. Look a little deeper."

And why do these psychotherapist-wannabees embrace the twin obsessions of incest and sexual abuse so devoutly? "It’s a question of Hell," opines Stan Passy, who is quoted in psychotherapists James Hillman and M. Ventura’s We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse (1992, NY, HarperSanFrancisco). Passy goes on to theorize that although we’ve lost the "place of Hell" in our culture, we are desperate to rediscover it, and as a result some therapists have redefined childhood (or at least the "death of the Inner Child") as Hell, and in the process have become ersatz priests who are on self-imposed evangelical missions to deliver their patients from Hell and its attendant damnation.

"So," concludes Passy, "we have a new Hell in modern times called childhood and a priest cult, a craft designed to save you from that Hell, all with the aim of recovering one’s lost innocence."

Heady stuff, indeed.

Dr. Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, co-authors of The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (1994, NY, St. Martin’s Press), advance this concept of a contemporary crusade by a deluded cabal to save patients, who are perceived as abused, from Hell one step farther. "The journey to recover our lost innocence takes us deep into the land of metaphor and myth," they state, citing, in addition to the "Inner Child" and the "Hell of Childhood," "the Myth of the Dysfunctional Family... (from which) we learn that every family is dysfunctional in one way or another and that family rules and customs ‘kill the souls of human beings.’"

There have been a number of legal victories for patients and their parents who sued the therapists. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge recently dismissed criminal charges against a father which were based on repressed memory, calling it "junk science."

Loftus and Ketcham also posit "the Myth of Psychic Determinism (from which) we discover that our personalties, psyches, and behaviors are determined by events that occurred in our childhood. While we may think we are free to choose, the myth teaches that we are passive characters acting out a script, moved and played upon by unconscious, uncontrollable forces."

There are two more myths which, Loftus and Ketcham point out, allow the neophyte therapist a chance to redeem their allegedly abused patients. "The Myth of Growth promises that we can ‘grow out of’ our complexes and conflicts and ‘grow into’ more mature, stable, understanding, and loving human beings. Salvation is possible... through the Myth of Total Recall. Memory is imagined as a computerized process in which every action, expression, emotion, and nuance of behavior is imprinted into the soft tissue of the mind. If we are willing to search for the Truth, we can discover it (and in the process be cured) by going back to the past, facing our demons, and reclaiming our lost innocence.

"Do the myths hold up to reality? Only if reality is molded and framed to fit the myth."

And what does it say about the quality of our mental health professionals when they so eagerly embrace this kind of science fiction? We think you already know the answer to that. At some point in time we are going to have to look into the qualifications and ethics of these therapists. The Hippocratic Oath enjoins the healer to "do no harm." These people are doing great harm. It is quackery that has spun out of control. Not one practitioner of this New Age panacea has expressed any regret or contrition. They speak of it with the wide-eyed, apocalyptic zeal of evangelists.

Will it be a priority that insurance pays for recovered memories, past-life regressions, space-alien abductions and satanic-cult conspiracies, even if memory-enhancement techniques are used? Dr. Richard Gardner of Columbia University said: "Sex abuse is big business. There’s lots of money to be made by a whole parade of individuals who involve themselves in these cases." Adult women who accuse their fathers may well turn to a lawyer for assistance. In the United States there is approximately one practicing lawyer for every 340 people. It is likely that these women will find one. Is the cure worse than the bite?

As Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker conclude in Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt (1995, NY, BasicBooks), "In Salem, it was an act of moral strength, political self-interest, and social progress to say ‘we were wrong.’ Three centuries later, it is up to all who sanctioned our modern-day sex-abuse witch hunt to help redress this terrible mistake."

It’s not going to go away soon. As long as there is such massive profit taking; as long as the media feed on spectacular allegations of depravity and never report exculpatory evidence; as long as there is such an enormous army of psychotherapists who are so incompetent they have nowhere else to go except downward to the bottom of the labor pool; as long as the propaganda is so pervasive that it would take an Emile Zola to bring it down, this travesty will endure. It is almost impossible to dislodge these beliefs with evidence because we did not get them with evidence. And we have a collective fascination with tales of horror and mystery, which explains the phenomenal success of Stephen King, Alfred Hitchcock and their imitators, and movies like Sybil. Perhaps the first thing we need to learn from all of this is the importance of not being stupid enough to believe everything we are told, but rather to examine, question and test popular beliefs.

Briefly, in closing, we would like to say unequivocally that we abhor the mistreatment of children, adults, animals, or anybody. That should go without saying. But during a witch hunt nothing goes without saying.l

Paul and Shirley Eberle are co-authors of the best-selling book, The Abuse Of Innocence: The McMartin Preschool Trial, (1993, Buffalo, NY; Prometheus Books) and The Politics of Child Abuse (1986, Secaucus, NJ; Lyle Stuart, Inc.)
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