On Recovered Memories

With his permission, I am posting here a post provided to another internet list today by past-president of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation, Peter Barach, Ph.D.

"...therapists have no way of knowing if a memory reported by a client is true or not. And the situation is no different for memories that clients have ALWAYS remembered than it is for newly-recalled memories that are unfamiliar to the client ("repressed memories"). Last time I looked, the standard EMDR protocol as it is taught in EMDR Institute Level I workshops included a mention to the client that the traumatic material worked on during EMDR may not be factual.

As Grant Fair pointed out, there has been a vicious public relations campaign to discredit the validity of recovered memory. You can read about how the media has been led astray in a Columbia Journalism Review article by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mike Stanton, "U-Turn on Memory Lane": http://www.cjr.org/year/97/4/memory.asp (if the server is down at this moment, try later).

In response to this media campaign, and to common misconceptions about recovered memories of abuse, I believe it is a good idea to give clients information about both sides of the issue so that they can better exercise critical judgment about their own memories. The following references are very thorough summaries of the scientific literature (one is a huge book, the other a lengthy article), and they reach very different conclusions than those promulgated by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and their supporters:

Brown, D., Scheflin, A.W., & Hammond, D.C. (1998). Memory, trauma treatment, and the law. New York: Norton.

Brown, D., Scheflin, A.W., & Whitfield, C. (1999). Recovered memories: The current weight of the evidence in science and in the courts. Journal of Psychiatry & Law, 27, 1-156."

Replies:

Re: On Recovered Memories, by contributor, 4/30/00 Re: On Recovered Memories, by Sandra Paulsen, Ph.D., 4/30/00 Re: On Recovered Memories, by Don, 4/30/00 Re: On Recovered Memories, by UFL, 5/1/00 Re: On Recovered Memories, by Anonymous, 5/12/00

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