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False memories?
The False Memory Syndrome Foundation dominated media coverage of child abuse for much of the 1990s.
To find out more about the Foundation, and its arguments, please click on the links below.
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what is the False Memory Syndrome Foundation?
The False Memory Syndrome Foundation was established in 1992 as an advocacy organisation for people claiming to be falsely accused of sexual abuse.
The Foundation was formed primarily through the efforts of Peter and Pamela Freyd (step-siblings and husband and wife) after they became aware that their adult daughter had disclosed to her husband that her father had sexually abused her as a child. Their daughter, Prof. Jennifer Freyd, is a respected professor of psychology who has since written extensively on the impact of child abuse on memory.*
Assisting the Freyds was Dr Ralph Underwager, a minister-turned-therapist who had testified for the defence in over 200 child abuse cases, including the Mr Bubbles ritual abuse case in Sydney. He had previously established Victims of Child Abuse Laws to advocate for people whose children were removed from them by child protection services for child abuse.* Underwager would step down from the board of the Foundation in 1993 after giving an interview in which he stated that paedophilia was blessed by God.*
With the assistance of Underwager and others, the FMSF established an advisory board with a number of prominent academics, and began to promulgate the notion of “False Memory Syndrome” through the academic and popular press. The Foundation defined FMSF as a social phenomenon of epidemic proportions, in which misguided therapists cause patients to invent memories of sexual abuse.
There have been a number of concerns about the activities of the FMSF, including:
- The Foundation’s founders and members diagnose thousands of people with FMS without actually meeting them.*
- The FMSF confabulates figures to create an “epidemic” of FMS for which there is no epidemiological evidence.*
- The Foundation accepts all denials of sexual abuse as true without asking for evidence, whilst stating that memories of sexual abuse are likely to be false unless there is evidence.*
- The Foundation founders and members have engaged in campaigns of harassment, defamation and intimidation against adults complaining of sexual abuse and the professionals who provide them with care.*****
- The Foundation’s founders and members have regularly threatened legal action to silence their critics, and have a history of unsuccessful court action against others for “defamation” (e.g. Freyd and Freyd vs Whitfield, Underwager and Wakefield vs Salter).
- The Foundation’s founders and members have deliberately misrepresented cases of sexual abuse in order to further their personal and political goals.***
- The board members of the Foundation make a considerable amount of money as “expert witnesses” as part of the defence teams for people accused of sexual abuse and other crimes.*
The definition of the syndrome is vague, and Pamela Freyd was unable to provide a list of symptoms or signs a year after establishing the Foundation.* It was later defined by Kilhstrom as:
“a condition in which a person's identity and interpersonal relationships are centered around a memory of traumatic experience which is objectively false but in which the person strongly believes.”
There have been a number of criticisms of FMS, such as:
- The definition of the syndrome did not evolve from clinical studies, but instead it is based on the accounts of parents claiming to be false accused of sexual abuse.*
- The syndrome is based on vague, unsubstantiated generalisations that do not hold up to scientific scrutiny. *
- The primary purpose of the syndrome is to discredit the testimony of people alleging child sexual abuse in court.*
- No empirical validation has been offered for the syndrome, nor have the symptoms been described and studied.*
- Where empirical evidence has been preferred for “False Memory Syndrome”, it has involved evidence of general memory errors rather then evidence of vivid, confabulated memories of child sexual abuse.*
- The syndrome has never been accepted as a valid diagnosis by any professional organisation, and use of the term in academic literature has prompted heated criticism.*
The FMSF claims that “False Memory Syndrome” is caused by “Recovered Memory Therapy”. There is no psychological therapy called “Recovered Memory Therapy”, and the term was invented by the Foundation in 1992 to describe any form of therapy in which a client might disclose memories of sexual abuse in childhood.
The FMSF argues that a recovered memory is likely to be a false memory, and that recovered memories are usually caused by therapists practing “Recovered Memory Therapy”. A number of criticisms can be made of this argument:
- The FMSF lumps evidence-based treatment for traumatic amnesia with fringe therapies under the term RMT, in an apparent attempt to discredit all treatment modalities for people with traumatic amnesia.
- A substantial proportion of those who recover memories do so without ever having participated in therapy, and where people recover memories whilst participating in therapy, most memories are recalled outside of therapy and without the use of specific memory techniques.*
- In a review of 30 former patients who sued their therapists for implanting false memories, Scheflin and Brown (1999) found that none of the cases involved therapy that could be characterised as “recovered memory therapy” e.g. a single-minded focus on recovering memories, or a client being misled in treatment.*
- After undertaking a review of research, Lindsay and Read (1994) concluded “there is little reason to fear that a few suggestive questions will lead psychotherapy clients to conjure up vivid and compelling illusory memories of childhood sexual abuse”. *
- It is extremely difficult to make people believe that a painful or graphic event occurred in their lives when it did not.*
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