The subject was recovered memories of sexual abuse, and from the TV lights to the spillover crowd, it was clear that this wasn’t a usual session of the American Psychological Association.
The eye-rolling, head-shaking and mumbled outrage that greeted unpopular views dramatized the profession’s deep split over the validity of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse.
Still, it was a shock to hear boos from among the 1,000 psychologists who heard memory expert Elizabeth Loftus, of the University of Washington, and psychologist John Briere, of the University of Southern California, debate the controversy.
“It was very surprising,” said Jeffrey Younggren, a Southern California psychologist, who said that in 15 previous conventions he had seen nothing like the scene in Toronto last August. “There were two camps, and opinions were very divided.”
The psychotherapy profession is divided and under attack. The public is taking sides too. Advocates for the incest-survivors and false-memory movements are becoming more entrenched. And lawyers are alarmed, with litigation costs heading toward an estimated $250 million by the year 2000.
While pleas for calm, caution and common ground come frequently from both sides, the reality is one of armed camps: those who see recovered-memory therapy as a potent tool for unearthing toxic memories of abuse, and those who see its power to implant false ones.
“If you doubt the validity of these memories, you call people who believe them `true believers,”‘ said Harry MacLean, a Denver lawyer and author of a book about the California case in which Eileen Franklin Lipsker’s sudden memory of seeing her father, George Franklin, kill an 8-year-old friend led to his conviction for murder 22 years after the deed.
“The true believers will say that those who raise questions about the truthfulness of repressed memories are perpetrators themselves or are covering up for perpetrators,” MacLean said.
The siege continues. More adults come to the anguished belief that their parents, other relatives or trusted friends molested them when they were young and that they blocked out all memory until undergoing recovered-memory therapy, or reading self-help books and attending 12-step groups for incest survivors. With encouragement from therapists, they cut off their relatives, sue them or even seek to jail them.
Also increasing dramatically is the number of people, mostly parents accused by their adult children, who say they are innocent, that these recovered memories are false, the product of a therapeutic theory gone out of control.
In recent months the number of people who say they’ve been falsely accused, lost their children and grandchildren, sold their homes to pay lawyers and forever carry the stigma of “perpetrators” has soared. Nearly 9,000 have sought help from the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in Philadelphia, a parents’ advocacy group started by an accused couple. Eight months ago, the number was about 3,000.
In one case, a 91-year-old Minnesota man is being sued by his 60-year-old daughter for incest, the memory of which she says she repressed for 57 years before a therapist helped her remember, according to Newsweek.
Reports in Time magazine and Oprah Winfrey in recent months have raised questions about the recovered-memory phenomenon; even Ann Landers has addressed it in her syndicated column.
Casting the issue in high relief have been accusations against Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, Catholic archbishop of Chicago, who denies all charges against him. On Feb. 28, all charges were dropped against Bernardin by his accuser who had filed a suit in Cincinnati federal court.
Making headlines in San Francisco was a Brown University professor’s lawsuit against the San Francisco Boys Chorus. Ross Cheit, at age 38, says he suddenly remembered being fondled by a former administrator at the chorus’ summer camp more than two decades ago. The chorus and William Farmer, now in Texas, have denied the charges.
Proponents of recovered-memory therapy have dismissed the false-memory parents and their public advocacy as a typical defense mounted by “perpetrators in denial.”
Calling the parents’ movement a “backlash” against incest and child sexual abuse survivors, some are waging a campaign to discount and discredit the theory of false memory and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
Meanwhile, a virtual vacuum greets anyone who turns to the therapy profession or ethics boards for speedy solutions. Frank Farley, president of the American Psychological Association, says he never has seen an issue in which “you have science and (therapeutic) practice coming into such conflict.”
Belief among mental-health professionals runs the gamut. Connecticut psychotherapist Karen Olio likens the parents’ false-memory movement to Pet Rocks-give something a name and it becomes real. However, sociologist Richard Ofshe, of the University of California-Berkeley, calls recovered-memory therapy “possibly the biggest psychologic quackery of this century.”
Instead, the “leadership” has come from attorneys, and “resolution” thus far has been confined to the courts, where lawsuits are piling up, and judges and juries are left to answer the key question: Which of these memories are true, and which are false.
“The pace of lawsuits is escalating,” said Patrick Clancy, a lawyer in the San Francisco area who defends accused molesters. Clancy says recovered-memory cases are becoming a larger part of his caseload.
Richard Farnell, an attorney in Orange County, Calif., who has won some of the biggest verdicts for plaintiffs in the state, says his four-lawyer office alone has handled “a couple of hundred” recovered-memory suits.
Brandt Caudill, an Orange County lawyer who defends therapists in court and before state licensers, predicts a 10-year wave of litigation costing $250 million.
“You’re really talking about a form of civil war here on a family basis,” he said. “The amounts of money are staggering. You won’t see the full extent for 10 years.”
The biggest verdict so far is $5.15 million, won by an Ohio woman against her uncle last year.
Criminal charges are climbing too, but slowly because they are much harder to prove. More states are allowing such cases, though, including California. A new law, passed without opposition in the state legislature, took effect Jan. 1, extending the statute of limitations to allow criminal charges in sexual abuse cases to be filed within three years of the time the abuse is remembered instead of within six years of the actual abuse.
Most district attorneys say they do not expect a tidal wave of charges because the law requires at least one piece of evidence to corroborate recovered memories.
Therapists are facing a new wave of lawsuits by former patients who have renounced their “memories” of incest, by those who say they falsely have been accused of abuse and now by patients recovering memories of abuse by the therapists themselves.
At least a half-dozen therapists who helped patients generate memories of grotesque ritual abuse by family members now stand accused of the same crimes, based on new memories “recovered” when the patient moved on to a new therapist, according to Anita Lipton at the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
“The therapists certainly believe they didn’t take the patient down to the basement and torture them with Nazi look-alikes,” Lipton said. “But they do believe the parents did that.”
Caudill calls the trend of recovered-memory suits the “next big wave” of malpractice charges to hit the profession, comparing it to the ’80s surge over therapists who had sex with patients. He predicted costs of $125 million over the next 10 years.
Insurers brace for an onslaught. At the American Professional Agency, the nation’s largest insurer of therapists, executive Eric Marine said, “In two, three years, there’s going to be an explosion.”
How many suits actually are filed will hinge on impending court rulings on third-party suits. Traditionally, only patients have been allowed to sue medical and mental health professionals, not parents or others who believe they were harmed by the patient’s care. But cases in the courts in Texas and California are seeking to open up that avenue.
In Texas, an appeals court ruled a father could sue a therapist who examined his son in a custody dispute and wrongly determined the father had abused the child. And in a California case heading for trial in March, a Superior Court judge refused to reject a father’s case against two therapists and a hospital under whose care his daughter decided he had raped her as a child.
Therapists critical of recovered memory believe such lawsuits are needed to force those in their profession to deal with the problem.
Said Younggren, the Southern California psychologist who serves as an expert for California’s licensing authorities: “I think this area will clean up very fast once lawsuits start hitting the therapists. It will only take a few big-dollar verdicts.”
Nearly keeping pace with the flurry of legal activity are the media. Psychology Today, one of dozens of magazines to examine the issue of recovered versus false memories, said the argument “must rank as America’s current top psychodrama.”
CNN took a hidden camera into a therapist’s office and came out with a diagnosis of repressed memories of child sexual abuse on the reporter’s first visit.
Nowhere is opinion more divided, or heated, than within the mental health profession. Multiple seminars and discussions on recovered-memory therapy and false memories were held at the annual meetings this year of the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco and the American Psychological Association in Toronto.
Psychiatrists have debated the matter in print, as Dr. Paul McHugh, of Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Miriam Butterfield, of the University of North Carolina, did in the Dec. 3 issue of Psychiatric News.
Dr. Judith Lewis Herman, a recovered-memory advocate and theoretician and an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, and memory-expert Loftus argued in the Harvard Medical News. And Loftus and Briere debated before their peers at the American Psychological Association convention in Toronto.
The debate most likely will continue for some time.
To trauma-recovery advocate Herman, the emergence of and attention to “false memories” is a retrogressive and thinly disguised smoke screen.
“We’re back where we were 20 years ago,” she told the New York Times. “This is a mobilization of accused perpetrators and their defenders to take the spotlight off perpetrators of crimes and put it back on victims and issues of their credibility.”
To McHugh, chairman of the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins and an adviser to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, the issue is different.
“This is a psychiatric issue and a much more complicated psychiatric issue than Dr. Herman appears to admit,” McHugh said. “That attitude trivializes the good faith effort of many, many people to get to the end of this confusion about memory and its relationship to actual events.”
