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Grex > Femme > #8: False Memory "Syndrome" - True or False? |  |
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| 12 new of 186 responses total. |
headdoc
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response 175 of 186:
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Nov 4 02:16 UTC 1995 |
Thank you, Michael, for clarifying who you meant by your "you's". I, myself
don't know how much I am "into denial" about anything. That's the concept
of denial. You don't know about it. (OK, I'll get serious here.) Haven't
read Schaef's book. I don't generally read books about gimicky concepts.
I never mind holding a mirror up to the work I do, but I won't lump all
therapists into any group, or submit any unspecified individuals to any
negative generalizations. I also try not to "practice my diseases" on the
people with whom I work. (The concept has me smiling.) They have enough
problems when they come to me, without me adding mine to theirs.
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md
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response 176 of 186:
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Nov 9 14:06 UTC 1995 |
The New York Review of Books is publishing in book form the essays on
repressed memory by Frederick Crews that caused so much controversy
when they were first published in NYR last year. Apparently the book
will also include the letters NYR received from therapists and others
who disagreed with Crews, along with Crews's replies. The book is
called _The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute_.
NYR is launching this book with bicoastal debates and lectures by
Crews and others, and on Wednesday, November 15, a live Internet
interview with Crews at the Internet Roundtable Society on the World
Wide Web, between 7 and 8 p.m., Pacific Time. To attend: go with your
web browser to:
http://www.irsociety.com/roundtable.html.
Those unable to attend may submit questions in advance to the
following email address: question@irsociety.com
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md
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response 177 of 186:
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Nov 15 21:04 UTC 1995 |
Most of _The Memory Wars_ appeared in the New York Review. The
introduction and the postscript are new. The postscript gives some
background on the avalanche of mail the NYR got after printing Crews's
articles (the most voluminous response NYR has ever received). The
sheer number of the letters and the tone of fear and anger in them
stunned everyone at first. Crews says he's been publishing essays
critical of Freudian theory since the early 1980s and there's never
been such a violent reaction.
Crews speculates that what's happened in the interim is that Freud's
fallacies have been exposed by one scholar after another, so the same
people who simply blew off Crews's earlier criticisms now have to say
"Yes, but..." More importantly, says Crews, it was interpreted as a
particularly ominous sign that his latest essays appeared in the New
York Review, which is correctly perceived as a bastion and refuge for
Upper West Side intellectuals -- the very last place on earth you'd
expect to find anti-Freudian polemics. Crews likens it to entrusting
your best friend with the care of your pet canary, then finding out
that he callously turned the job over to his cat.
In my opinion, the reason Crews is hated by so many therapists and
academic Freudians is that he's like a highbrow Dennis Miller. How do
the letter-writers represented in this book -- plodding ideology-bound
academics, and panicky therapists simply trying to survive from one
diminishing insurance check to the next -- hope to compete with
someone like that? Also, by exposing the connection between
traditional Freudians and the recovered memory movement, Crews has
deeply embarrassed the traditional Freudians. It's like tattling that
the president of the Junior League has a sister who lives in a trailor
park and listens to country music.
Anyway, it's fascinating and great fun to read.
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md
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response 178 of 186:
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Nov 30 18:31 UTC 1995 |
Saw an interesting ad for a book called _Satan's Silence_ so I
picked up a copy at Borders. It documents the weird accusations of
"satanic ritual abuse" since the early 1980s. As mentioned in prior
responses, investigations by law-enforcement professionals,
including the FBI, have failed to produce any evidence that satanic
ritual abuse has ever actually happened in the cases that went to
trial, or in any other cases. The evidence against almost all of
the dozens of people currently imprisoned after being convicted of
SRA consists solely of statements elicited from young children
during abusive interrogations by police, prosecutors and therapists.
This book is especially interesting on the subject of "syndromes."
A medical syndrome is a group of signs and symptoms that
collectively characterize or indicate a particular disease or
abnormal condition. Guillain-Barre syndrome, for example, can be
positively diagnosed if polyneuritis, progressive muscular weakness
of the arms and legs, and high levels of protein in the
cerebrospinal fluid all occur together in a person who has recently
recovered from an infectious disease. If you see all of those signs
and symptoms you can diagnose Guillain-Barre syndrome with absolute
certainty, and you can treat the patient accordingly.
The problem with using the word "syndrome" to identify histories of
abuse, as in "Child Sexual Abuse Accomodation Syndrome," is that it
gives the illusion of medical precision to something that is neither
medical nor precise. "Symptoms" such as bed-wetting, nightmares and
masturbation aren't really diagnostic of anything. Children who
haven't been abused often have them, and children who have been
abused often don't have them. The use of the word "syndrome" in
this connection has to do with law, not medicine. It's application
to various kinds of sexual abuse, real and imagined, was first made
in order to enable expert witnesses to testify in behalf of
prosecutors when there was no evidence of satanic ritual abuse, or
even non-satanic abuse, other than the statements coerced out of
small children (which was virtually every case). The "expert
witnesses" were often the very people who had invented the phony
"syndrome" for this purpose in the first place.
Part of the controversy over the term "false memory syndrome" arises
from a very understandable outrage on the part of believers in
satanic ritual abuse, and therapists who still believe in repressed
memory, over seeing the skeptics, their most dangerous enemies,
using their own tactics against them. ("The devil quoting
scripture" is especially apt here.)
_Satan's Silence_ is by Debbie Nathan, a journalist, and Michael
Snedeker, an attorney, and is published by Basic Books (1995).
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beeswing
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response 179 of 186:
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Jan 18 07:59 UTC 1996 |
Hmm. I can understand the argument of this, but... I know someone who was
sexually abused in some kind of satanic ritual of sorts. I have no reason not
to beleive her. She remembers some of it but not all, and has been in therapy
and has taken Prozac for years. The way I see it, you beliethey tell you this.
(sorry, was written and this may be out of order). I don't know, it's a hard
issue. .
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brighn
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response 180 of 186:
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Jan 18 17:24 UTC 1996 |
There *are* Satanic ritual abuse cases, and I don't think there's any
denial of that. What's in denial w/r/t Satanic ritual abuse is that
they're as widespread as they are, and that they involve murder and
rape as much as they're alleged to. There are cases of teenagers reading
the necrinomicon and listening to too much death metal and deciding to
avenge themselves upon someone or other by getting their jollies in the
name of Satan. There's enough psychopaths and sociopaths in this country
that a handful of them are going to blame Satan for their actions.
*shrug*
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md
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response 181 of 186:
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Jan 18 17:28 UTC 1996 |
Actually, beeswing, the odds are that your friend was never sexually
abused in any kind of satanic ritual. However, it's possible that she
*is* currently being abused by her therapist, both psychologically and
emotionally. She needs all the understanding and support you can give
her. Although I wouldn't recommend challenging her SRA narratives at this
point, you can and probably should encourage her to get second and third
opinions from reputable Ph.D. psychologists and M.D. psychiatrists. If
they confirm what I suspect is going on, then she should hire a good
lawyer and sue her current therapist. At the end of the process hopefully
she'll be back in touch with reality, and maybe even have a pot of money
into the bargain.
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brighn
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response 182 of 186:
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Jan 18 20:28 UTC 1996 |
Yes, Michael, those are the *odds*. And yours might be the best course
of action... at any rate, it's often best in extreme cases to get second
opinions opinions anyway. But it's also possibly (albeit fairly implausible)
that the SRA report is accurate. ...
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beeswing
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response 183 of 186:
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Feb 2 21:15 UTC 1996 |
Well, thing is, this was a highly publicized case and was in the media... it
happened at a church daycare. She says this happened when she was 6 or so and
she has been in therapy for around 10 years, though not on a regular basis
anymore. She recieved a legal settlement in the case. But like I said, I have
no reason not to believe her. The FBI has yet to prove a single case of SRA
in the US, though it gets hurnderds of allegations a year (and I am not saying
SRA isnt' real, I am just stating fact). The way I see it, if you say you were
abused, its best to believe them... if they WERE abused they will need help.
If they weren't but are saying they were, they still need help. And having
personal experience with this (which I'd rather not get into) I tend to know
what I am dealing with here.
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aaron
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response 184 of 186:
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Feb 4 09:42 UTC 1996 |
The FBI has found isolated cases of ritual abuse, including cases where
"satanic" imagery was used. In most cases, the imagery was used to
intimidate, not because the abuser/abusers worshipped satan. In the other
cases it appeared to be something of a lark for the abuser, much as some
teenagers sport satanic imagery for its shock value.
What they have not found is any evidence of a "network" of satanists --
the ritual abuse cases, which are for the most part non-satanic in nature,
are the work of isolated individuals, or small groups (2 - 4 people).
In one case, involving three offenders (if I recall correctly), two men
in essence stood by while another committed a homicide based upon a
sacrifice scene from a work of fiction, involving satanic trappings and
the carving of a pentagram into the chest of the victim. That's the most
compelling U.S. case of "satanic ritual abuse" that I have encountered.
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mcpoz
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response 185 of 186:
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Jul 10 01:10 UTC 1996 |
There was an interesting article on the radio about "False Memory" research.
A researcher named Daniel Schachter - Harvard Prof of Psychology was
interviewed on NPR and he discussed his research.
He would ask a subject to listen to a group of associated words. It may have
been 20 words in succession such as "Sugar, salt, sour, . . . . . "
Next he would ask the subject if his list had included "sugar" (which it had),
etc. He would then ask the subject if his list included the word "sweet"
(Which it hadn't). If the researcher said "yes" he was able to monitor brain
activity through brain scans (I think it was NMR scans).
He found in each case where the subject said "yes" to a word which was highly
associated with the group, but not in it, the brain activity was significantly
different than a true memory. He said this is not "lie detector" material,
but it is currently a hot topic of research.
He told of a true story where a woman was raped and sometime later made a
positive identification of a man who happened to be a psychiatrist. It turned
out that the Psychiatrist had an iron clad alibi. He was "live" on TV at the
time of the rape. She had seen his face on the screen at the time of the
trauma and had processed this as a false memory.
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md
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response 186 of 186:
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Dec 7 13:58 UTC 1997 |
A lot has changed in the 4 years since headdoc entered this item.
Just for starters, that East Coast group that she mentions in #0,
the one that's named after false memory syndrome, is now recognized
by the APA as an educational provider. It's called the False Memory
Syndrome Foundation. A Chicago-area hospital and two psychologists
recently paid a $10,000,000 settlement in a lawsuit brought against
them by a patient in whom they had instilled false memories. This
is the biggest, but by no means the only, case in which a patient
has successfully sued her psychologist. Five people in Texas,
including a psychologist and two psychiatrists, were recently
indicted by a grand jury on numerous counts of fraud involving
patients of theirs whom they had diagnosed with "recovered" memories
of childhood abuse and consequent "multiple personality disorder"
(or "dissociative identity disorder" as it's now called). Seems
they made these "diagnoses" only in the patients with the best
insurance, even going so far as to pay their insurance premiums
for them. The prosecutors in Texas believe this will not be an
easy case to win, but they're obviously doing okay sa far.
beeswing, I hope your friend has spoken with a lawyer. $10,000,000
might not even come close to making up for the agony her therapist
has put her through, but if she's going to be miserable anyway isn't
it better to be miserable and have $10,000,000?
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