Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

The debate over repressed memory therapy generated a vast literature. Loftus (1993) supplies much more detail then I have space for here on the issue of the reality of the memories recovered by patients during therapy. Loftus is a leading researcher in the cognitive psychology of memory who has made major contributions to the understanding of how malleable human memory is even under nonextreme conditions. Her book (Loftus and Ketcham 1994) is probably the best treatment of the repressed memory episode yet written. Crews’s (1995) book, also an excellent and chilling read, focuses much more specifically on the role of Freudian psychology in the repressed memory movement.

If a woman had no memory of abuse during childhood, how was she to know that she had been abused? This was supposedly established by the psychological difficulties she suffered from. The first (1988) edition of Courage to Heal includes a checklist of symptoms that is so long and nonspecific that almost anyone reading it could convince herself that she has some of the symptoms indicating that she had been abused. As Crews (1995) points out, these checklists have disappeared from later editions of the work, no doubt because of the serious criticism they engendered. But they were there at the beginning and contributed to the generation of what became a wave of near hysteria. In another early book on the topic, Blume (1990) warned readers that if they “speak too softly, or wear too many clothes, or have ‘no awareness at all’ of having been violated” (quoted in Crews 1995, p. 196), then they probably had been abused. Thus, a memory of a pleasant childhood with no hint of abuse was often a “fantasy” created to help the repression of the horrible actual events.

Often the process of becoming convinced that one’s symptoms were due to unremembered childhood sexual abuse began in a therapist’s office. The patient would seek help for rather common psychological maladies such as depression, anxiety, or general difficulties in getting along with others and end up convinced that previously unsuspected and unremembered abuse was responsible. But at this point, while the patient may have accepted the abuse explanation, there was still no memory of the abuse. If it was the case that, in order to treat the psychological problems, the abuse had to be consciously remembered, this posed a problem—how to get the patient to recover those repressed memories? To accomplish this, techniques were used that, in a different time and place and with different people (specifically, with American POWs in the Korean War), would have been considered torture and would have been banned by the Genevea Convention.

The techniques used included hypnosis, participation in support groups, something called guided imagery, and drugs such as sodium pentathol, also known as truth serum. As noted in the section on claims of UFO abductions (pp. 268–81), hypnosis is not a state that is conducive to obtaining accurate information from memory. Rather, it is a process that can create memories of events that never took place and cause the individual to strongly believe that the false memories are real. Thus, the use of hypnosis by therapists who believe that a patient’s symptoms are due to unremembered sexual abuse will frequently be “successful” in that the therapist will be able to implant memories of abuse that never took place. Hypnosis was often combined with group therapy sessions, where patients who had already accepted the reality of their hypnotically induced abuse memories put pressure on patients who had not yet done so. Such group pressure is very powerful, and was also used by UFO groups to “help” abductees come to accept the reality of their abduction experiences.

One technique not, to my knowledge, ever used on UFO abductees, but widely used to help recover repressed memories, was guided imagery, also known as visualization. In this technique patients are trained in how to form vivid images, in visual, tactile, and other sensory modalities, of incidents of abuse. Consider, for example, a woman who suspects that she was abused by, say, her uncle, but has no specific memories of such abuse. She would be instructed to go home, lie on her bed, and imagine that she is lying on her bed when she was a child. She should then imagine her uncle coming into her room and fondling her, forcing her to fondle him as, maybe, he undresses. She should then imagine the uncle climbing on top of her and entering her. This type of exercise is repeated until the patient is convinced she has a real memory of her uncle’s abuse. In some cases, the imagery takes place in the therapist’s office with the therapist helping, or “guiding,” the scenario. Obviously such a procedure, along with the social pressure of the therapist, a “support” group of patients already convinced that their recovered memories are real, and hypnosis, forms a belief that totally fictitious, albeit truly terrifying, memories are very real. In addition, it is now clear that the cases of MPD reported in patients subjected to recovered memory “therapy” were caused by the same therapeutic techniques. This was especially true for hypnosis, where the hypnotized, and thus highly suggestible, patient had the different personalities encouraged to “come out” and “show themselves.” The effects of such techniques are graphically illustrated in the episode of the PBS documentary series Frontline titled “The Search for Satan,” first broadcast on October 24, 1995.

In some extreme cases, sodium pentathol was used to aid in recovering memories of abuse. This drug can be thought of as sort of a chemical hypnosis. It does not force the patient to tell the truth. Rather, like hypnosis, it induces a state in which the patient becomes highly suggestible (Piper 1993).

The results of such “therapy” were, as might be expected, disastrous. Although exact figures will probably never been known, tens of thousands of families were torn apart by accusations of abuse recovered in therapy. Part of the treatment included getting angry at the abuser and confronting him or her. This led to both civil and criminal cases in which often elderly parents were charged with criminal activity or subject to damage suits, based on nothing more than the memories recovered in therapy.

The concept of human memory advocated by recovered memory therapists was totally contrary to what is known about how human memory actually works. As noted earlier, there is no evidence that repression is a real phenomenon. Certainly forgetting is, as we all know, real. Forgetting can be defined as the loss of information in memory over time due to nonuse of the information in question or interference from other sources. In the Freudian view of repression, memories of traumatic events are said to be stored away, in more or less complete form, somewhere deep in the unconscious were we cannot access them—until, of course, the recovered memory therapists dig them out. It was these repressed memories, festering away outside of consciousness, that were said to cause so many of the symptoms and problems that women sought therapy for in the first place. It is possible that in a very few cases, patients had forgotten cases of abuse and that this was reversed in therapy. But it seems clear now that the vast, vast majority of recovered memories of abuse were simply false and had been created by the interventions of the therapists. The fact that, for the patients, the recovered memories were frighteningly real and obviously engendered very real emotional reactions in no way proves that they were real. The memories created in UFO abductees are also seen as very real and frightening and traumatic by the individuals in question, and these memories are clearly false.

In fact, if anything, memories of traumatic events stick in our memory much more persistently than memories of more mundane events. This is the basis for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition in which someone who has suffered some traumatic event or situation can’t stop remembering it. The event plays out in the mind again and again, terrifying each time, sometimes for years after the event. It might actually seem that it would be better if human memory did come with some sort of repression mechanism so that we wouldn’t be haunted by troubling memories of highly unpleasant events. But as Daniel Schacter argued in the excellent book on human memory The Seven Sins of Memory (2001), PTSD is actually a side effect of a valuable and useful aspect of normal memory functioning. It highlights memories of dangerous events. For example, getting attacked by a saber-toothed tiger would certainly have been a traumatic event for early man. And, assuming that the attack was survived, it would have been vital to remember the details of the attack—where it took place, visual or auditory cues that warned of the attack, and so forth. If there was a mechanism that repressed memories of traumatic events, our early ancestors would not have been able to learn from unpleasant experience, certainly a vital part of survival.