False Memories And The Science Of Credibility: Who Gets To Be Heard?

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) was officially dissolved on December 31, 2019. The FMSF was launched in 1992 in the United States, with the stated aim of promoting awareness of a supposed epidemic of “false memories” of sexual abuse. At this time, social awareness of child abuse had led to considerable cultural and legal change. Children and adults were disclosing child abuse in unprecedented numbers, and therapy for complex trauma and dissociation was emerging as a specialist mental health field. Scientific recognition of delayed disclosure and traumatic amnesia prompted a range of law reform efforts to expand opportunities for adult survivors to pursue civil damages or criminal charges, acknowledging that most abused children do not disclose at the time, and that some survivors may have limited or no recall of the abuse (Mindlin, 1990).

In reaction, there was a backlash against child protection investigations and criminal prosecutions of child sexual abuse cases (A. Salter, 1998). This backlash had been gathering momentum throughout the 1980s, as US-based advocacy groups such as Victims of Child Abuse Laws claimed that suggestive interviewing techniques were leading children to make false allegations of sexual abuse (Hechler, 1988). The FMSF appears to have been a continuation of this campaign, albeit targeting new legal remedies for adult survivors (Blizard & Shaw, 2019). The FMSF argued that many or most adults disclosing abuse in childhood were suffering from “false memory syndrome,” in which therapists implanted false memories of abuse that never took place. Despite the passionate claims of FMSF advocates to rationality and science, false memory syndrome was never accepted in psychiatric diagnostic systems. Nonetheless, as a concept, it leant pseudo-scientific heft to the denials of parents (often fathers) accused of sexual abuse by adult children (typically daughters; Gaarder, 2000).

The therapeutic field of complex trauma and dissociation was the main target of the FMSF and “Multiple Personality Disorder” (MPD, now dissociative identity disorder or DID) served as their stalking horse. At the time that the FMSF was founded, MPD had only recently been recognized in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980. The FMSF exploited public ignorance about this relatively new diagnosis to mischaracterize the mental health field as saturated with professional misconduct. The subsequent legal and media attacks on therapists and authors in the trauma field have been well documented (Calof, 1998; Pope, 1996; A. Salter, 1998). Like any field of practice, but particularly in an emerging specialization, the quality of treatment for MPD/DID existed on a spectrum from outstanding to less so, but lawsuits targeted some of the best in the field as well as others. The implications for professional practice in complex trauma and dissociation were far-reaching. Those therapists who continued to research, diagnose, and treat dissociative disorders did so in the face of professional skepticism and isolation. Some left the field, while others were dissuaded from entering.

The original scenario of false memory implantation involved a client with no history of abuse who was subjected by a therapist to highly suggestive techniques designed to elicit misleading thoughts and feelings about abuse (Chris R Brewin & Bernice Andrews, 2017b). However, over time, the false memory movement would identify a range of potential indirect influences that might give rise to false memories. Just being exposed to information about child sexual abuse through television or books might be enough, advocates suggested, to trigger the onset of false memories (Pope, 1996). The image of the false accuser shifted from a victim of therapeutic malpractice to a malingerer or opportunist who was motivated to concoct false memories for attention, financial compensation, or to explain away their own shortcomings.

The elasticity of the logic of false memories attracted many admirers. Kitzinger (2004) has remarked upon the extraordinary appeal of false memory syndrome among journalists in the 1990s, some of whom took up the cause of accused men as a personal crusade. She attributes the activist role of journalists in debates over false memories to a male-dominated newsroom culture that was skeptical of claims of sexual violence. Some media outlets found the novel and emotional dimensions of false memory stories to be commercially appealing. Journalists championing false memory syndrome played a central role in the dissemination of false memory theories well beyond the bounds of the United States (M. Salter, 2017).

Throughout the 1990s, false memory societies forged close working relationships between academics and lawyers, and theories of false memories became influential in civil, criminal, and family court matters. Warnings that false memory researchers who received substantial sums of money as defense experts were in a conflicted position vis-à-vis their interpretation of their results went largely unheeded (Freyd & Quina, 2000). Instead, false memory research has proceeded in a manner that has been particularly beneficial for criminal defendants, while relevant areas of inquiry have been largely neglected by false memory scholars (Becker‐Blease & Freyd, 2017; Brewin & Andrews, 2017a). The narrow focus of false memory research on preventing uncorroborated allegations of abuse has deflected inquiry away from the possibility that abuse survivors’ testimony may be wrongly dismissed, along with the ways perpetrators may interfere with survivors’ memories for abuse (Becker‐Blease & Freyd, 2017).

Within an echo chamber of academic, legal, and media sympathy, the notion that memories of child sexual abuse are particularly untrustworthy became taken-for-granted “common sense.” One of the recurring characteristics of the application of false memory research – whether in courts, in the media, or in the community at large – is that it is most often deployed against the powerless and in the interests of the powerful. Once it was successfully mobilized against women complaining of child sexual abuse, the concept of false memories was also available to dismiss other forms of testimony that challenged the status quo.

For instance, in the late 1990s, Australia began to openly acknowledge the history of the Stolen Generations, in which an estimated one-third of Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families from the 1910s to the 1970s as part of an explicitly genocidal state program (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997). In response, a group of journalists rallied against the testimony of survivors, who they accused of false memories (Tatz, 2001). When two survivors of the Stolen Generations attempted to sue the Australian state (Cubillo and Gunner v the Commonwealth of Australia), the logic of false memories featured centrally in the judicial determination that their removal was lawful (Cunneen & Grix, 2003). In Cubillo, O’Laughlin J stated:

I am also concerned that they [the complainants] have unconsciously engaged in exercises of reconstruction, based, not on what they knew at the time, but on what they have convinced themselves must have happened or what others may have told them.

Consistently, and persistently, theories of false memories have been aptly available for the exculpation of the wealthy and the powerful. This point is illustrated by a brief overview of some of the cases where prominent false memory researcher Professor Elizabeth Loftus has appeared: in the defense of a Bosnian-Croatian soldier for aiding and abetting the rape of a Muslim woman, to exculpate a senior aide to then-Vice President Dick Cheney for misleading investigators regarding the leak of the name of a CIA operative, to question the credibility of Professor Christine Blasey-Ford when she complained about an alleged sexual assault as a teenager by current Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for the defense team of the convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein and for accused child trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

Most recently, in Australia, allegations of false memories were revived when it emerged that a woman known only as “Kate” (who, sadly, died by suicide in 2019) claimed to have been sexually assaulted by the Australian politician Christian Porter (and, at the time of the allegation, Attorney General) when they were both teenagers (MItchell et al., 2021). Porter, like Kavanaugh, vigorously denied the allegation. There was no court case but instead a journalist speculated that Kate suffered from “recovered memories,” on the basis that she had apparently read Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score prior to her allegations becoming public knowledge (Hardaker, 2021). By this logic, merely reading a book that mentions child sexual abuse could be the trigger for a false allegation; never mind that Kate diarized the alleged assault while still a teenager, or that she had described the incident to friends decades prior to reading van der Kolk.

In a sign of how much has changed since the 1990s, the response to this argument was not agreement but outrage. This outrage was evident across social media but also from within journalism itself. The media outlet who ran the original piece quickly assigned another journalist to cover the story from a more sympathetic angle, while Australian media outlets ran multiple pieces rebutting the false memory proposition. One journalist wrote about his own diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder and its impact on his capacity to recall traumatic events and correctly label them as harmful (Morton, 2021).

Undoubtedly, the emergence of the false memory movement three decades ago had a negative effect on professional and social understandings of trauma and dissociation. However, it also provoked researchers, practitioners, survivors, and advocates to redouble their efforts to develop the evidence base for trauma therapy. Reinders and Veltman’s recent editorial in the British Journal of Psychiatry laid out the cumulative neurobiological evidence for the trauma model of DID. The diagnosis that the FMSF insisted, a quarter century ago, was a passing fad with no scientific foundation is now out of the shadows (Reinders & Veltman, 2021). Meanwhile, the forms of betrayal, abuse, and violation that false memory syndrome sought to explain away as mere confabulations are now recurrent features of media and policy commentary. Multiple criminal cases and public inquiries have substantiated the seriousness of child sexual abuse and exploitation, institutional tendencies toward denial and cover-up, and the inadequacies of the current policy response.

The FSMF closed with a whimper rather than a bang. The American branch had been inactive for many years, with almost half of their advisory board deceased, and many of those still alive in their 80s and 90s. The new generation of mental health professionals may never have heard their names, or merely see them as a historical curiosity. But their legacy persists in ongoing media, academic, legal, and community skepticism. The aim of this special issue is to examine the science and the politics of the false memory movement, and reflect on what the field of complex trauma and dissociation can learn from this turbulent period in our establishment and development.

The special issue begins with a commentary from Lynn Crook, who provides a personal as well as scholarly reflection on the power of false memory rhetoric. She recounts the public mischaracterizations of her civil suit against her parents by Professor Loftus, and the successful rhetorical strategies drawn on by false memory advocates in the press.

“Hyping Hypnosis: The Myth that Made Capturing the Friedmans Persuasive” by Ross Cheit provides a detailed case study of the influence of false memory logic on the media and judicial processes. Cheit outlines how the Academy Award-nominated documentary Capturing the Friedmans (Jarecki et al., 2004) significantly misrepresented the facts of the prosecution of Arnold and Jesse Friedman for sexual offenses against multiple boys. The documentary’s false narrative about hypnosis formed the basis for an appeal in the case, as well as a judicial recommendation that the case should be reviewed. Cheit’s diligent research and incisive analysis are every bit as compelling as his exposure of media hype interfering with prosecution of child abuse cases in The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology and the Sexual Abuse of Children (Cheit, 2014).

In the second article of the special issue, Ashley Conway and David Pilgrim analyze the points of convergence between the British Psychological Society (BPS) and the British False Memory Society (BFMS). They provide a detailed history of the capture of BPS policy-making processes on recovered memories by academics with significant advisory roles and sympathies with the BFMS, and map professional disagreements over recovered memories between psychologists working in “open systems” (that is, in clinical practice) and those in “closed systems” (laboratory-based experimentation). Their useful clarification of key epistemological and methodological differences in psychological debates over false and recovered memories, while focused on the British context, has international relevance.

In “The history and politics of ‘false memories’: The Australian Experience,” McMaugh and Middleton explore similarities and differences in the Australian controversies over false memories in comparison to other countries. They trace the importation of the notion of a false memory syndrome from the United States into Australia where it received a relatively modest reception. Despite enthusiasm for the false memory concept in some corners of Australian media, Australian courts imposed a high standard for the admission of false memory expert testimony, which blunted acceptance of the false memory movement. The Australian False Memory Association would sputter out by the early 2000s although some journalists continue to reference the logic of false memories in attacks on the credibility of survivors. McMaugh and Middleton provide an important history of the false memory movement in a country where it achieved limited success.

Paula Thomson and S. Victoria Jaque’s “Attachment and Memory Stability” brings insight into some of the obstacles survivors experience in recounting abuse. Those with unresolved trauma or loss may have difficulty forming a coherent narrative, confuse timelines, report traumatic memory blocks, minimize abuse, or attempt to deny altogether that it occurred, despite indicators that abuse happened. Such incoherent discourse could readily be misinterpreted as a false memory or that the individual is unreliable in their testimony. However, in this study, participants’ memory for adverse childhood experiences was highly stable over 1 year. Contrary to what false memory advocates infer, survivors in treatment are likely to become better able to recount their abuse memories. Further research could be of value in determining whether helping survivors develop a more coherent narrative leads to a sense of resolution for past abuse. Even if they continue to express regret, pain, or distress, this greater internal coherence may be reflected in a more secure sense of self.

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