RECOVERED MEMORIES: SEEKING THE MIDDLE GROUND doc

RECOVERED MEMORIES: SEEKING THE MIDDLE GROUND Recovered Memories: Seeking the Middle Ground. Edited by Graham M. Davies and Tim Dalgleish Copyright  2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. ISBNs: 0-471-49131-4 (HB); 0-471-49132-2 (PB) RECOVERED MEMORIES: SEEKING THE MIDDLE GROUND Edited by Graham M. Davies University of Leicester, UK and Tim Dalgleish MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, UK JOHN WILEY & SONS, LTD Chichester · New York · Weinheim · Brisbane · Singapore · Toronto Copyright © 2001 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Baffins Lane, Chichester, West Sussex PO19 1UD, England National 01243 779777 International (+44) 1243 779777 e-mail (for orders and customer service enquiries): cs-books@wiley.co.uk Visit our Home Page on http://www.wiley.co.uk or http://www.wiley.com All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 0LP, UK, without the permission in writing of the Publisher. Other Wiley Editorial Offices John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158-0012, USA WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH, Pappelallee 3, D-69469 Weinheim, Germany John Wiley Australia Ltd, 33 Park Road, Milton, Queensland 4064, Australia John Wiley & Sons (Asia) Pte Ltd, 2 Clementi Loop #02-01, Jin Xing Distripark, Singapore 129809 John Wiley & Sons (Canada) Ltd, 22 Worcester Road, Rexdale, Ontario M9W 1L1, Canada Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Recovered memories: seeking the middle ground/edited by Graham M. Davies and Tim Dalgleish. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-471-49131-4 (cased) — ISBN 0-471-49132-2 (pbk.) 1. Recovered memory. 2. False memory syndrome. 3. Adult child abuse victims — Psychology. 4. Child sexual abuse — Investigation. I. Davies, Graham, 1943- II. Dalgleish, Tim. RC455.2.F35 R4285 2001 616.85Ј82239—de21 2001033242 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-471-49131-4 (cased) ISBN 0-471-49132-2 (paper) Typeset in 10/12pt Palatino by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts This book is printed on acid-free paper responsibly manufactured from sustainable forestry, in which at least two trees are planted for each one used for paper production. CONTENTS About the editors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii About the contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Part I The social aspects 1 Socio-historical perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Tim Dalgleish and Nicola Morant 2 Recovered memories: effects upon the family and community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Gisli H. Gudjonsson 3 Recovered memories of abuse: effects on the individual . . . . . 35 Adrian E.G. Skinner 4 Recovered memories: the legal dilemmas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Eilis Magner and Patrick Parkinson Part II Evidential aspects 5 The recovered memories controversy: where do we go from here? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 D. Stephen Lindsay and J. Don Read 6 Discovering fact and fiction: case-based analyses of authentic and fabricated discovered memories of abuse . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Katharine K. Shobe and Jonathan W. Schooler 7 Is it possible to discriminate true from false memories? . . . . . 153 Graham M. Davies Part III Clinical aspects 8 Therapeutic techniques, therapeutic contexts and memory . . . 177 D.A. Bekerian and M.H. O’Neill 9 Recovered memories in therapy: clinicians’ beliefs and practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Bernice Andrews 10 Establishing practice-based guidelines for therapists . . . . . . . . 205 Noelle Robertson 11 Psychogenic amnesias: functional memory loss . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 Michael Kopelman and John Morton Part IV Concluding comments 12 Memories of abuse and alien abduction: close encounters of a therapeutic kind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 M. J. Power Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271 vi CONTENTS ABOUT THE EDITORS Graham Davies, DSc, is a Professor of Psychology at Leicester University, England. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a Chartered Forensic Psychologist. His major research interests lie in the eyewitness testimony of children and adults, on which he has published some 100 papers and five books. He was a co-author to the British Psychological Society’s Report on Recovered Memories (1995) and of a commentary on the American Psychological Association’s report on the same issue. He has acted as an adviser to the Home Office and to the police service on issues concerning adult and child testimony and is the lead author of Achieving Best Evidence in Criminal Proceedings: Guidance for Vulnerable and Intimidated Witnesses, Including Children, to be published by the Home Office in 2001. He is the immediate past Chair of the Society of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (SARMAC) and President-elect of the European Association of Psychology and Law. Tim Dalgleish is a Research Scientist at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK and a practising Clinical Psychologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. He carried out his doctoral thesis at the Institute of Psychiatry in London where he also completed his clini- cal training, before moving to Cambridge. His research interests include psychological reactions to trauma and cognition–emotion relations in emotional disorders in general. He has co-authored a book, Cognition and Emotion: From Order to Disorder with Mick Power with whom he also jointly edited the Handbook of Cognition and Emotion. ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Dr. Bernice Andrews is Reader in Psychology at Royal Holloway University of London. She has researched and published extensively on childhood and adult abuse and was a member of the British Psychological Society’s Working Party on Recovered Memories. She subsequently led an Economic and Social Research Council study on recovered memories in clinical practice. Dr Debra A. Bekerian is the principal author of many papers on applied memory and forensic psychology. Her interests include eyewitness testi- mony, the development of personal memory in children, and the effects of trauma on personal memory. She is a Reader in Psychology at the University of East London. Gisli Gudjonsson is a Professor of Forensic Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, and Head of the Forensic Psychology Services at the Maudsley. He has published extensively in the areas of psychologi- cal vulnerability and false confession and is the author of well over 200 scientific articles. He pioneered the empirical measurement of sug- gestibility and provided expert evidence in a number of high-profile cases. He is the author of The Psychology of Interrogations, Confessions and Testimony (Wiley, 1992). Michael Kopelman is Professor of Neuropsychiatry within King’s College London and the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust. He holds qualifications in both neuropsychiatry and neuropsychology, and has published widely on organic and psychogenic aspects of amnesia. D. Stephen Lindsay is Professor of Psychology at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. He is a cognitive psychologist who earned his PhD from Princeton University. Much of his research has focused on memory source monitoring (e.g. studies of conditions under which people mistake memories of suggestions as memories of witnessed events) in adults and children. Eilis Magner is Foundation Professor of Law at the University of New England. The university is located in Armidale, New South Wales (not in the north-eastern United States of America!). She took up the position in 1996 after spending 16 years as a member of faculty at the University of Sydney. She has written extensively in the areas of evidence law, thera- peutic jurisprudence and company law. Nicola Morant is a Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology at Anglia Polytechnic University (Cambridge, UK). Her research interests are broadly in the area of social processes related to mental health issues. This includes work on mental health service evaluation, service users’ per- spectives, social representations theory and therapeutic communities. John Morton is a cognitive psychologist with a primary interest in mod- elling cognitive processes. He has been involved in lots of experimental work on memory with children as well as adults and was Chair of the Working Party of the British Psychological Society on Recovered Memories. Max O’Neill is a post-graduate researcher in the department of psychol- ogy at the University of East London. He is currently working on research in the areas of memory and trauma and new projects involving the study of children’s autobiographical memory acquisition. Max is also studying for an MSc in counselling psychology. Patrick Parkinson is a Professor of Law and Pro-Dean at the Faculty of Law, University of Sydney. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including Child Sexual Abuse and the Churches (1997), and has written widely on family law and child protection. He was Chairperson of a major review of the state law concerning child welfare, which led to the enactment of the Children and Young Persons (Care and Protection) Act 1998 (NSW). He has also been involved in many other law reform issues concerning the protection of children. Mick Power is currently Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, a practising clinical psychologist at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, and a research adviser to the World Health Organisation. He has carried out extensive research in the area of cogni- tion and emotion and written widely on related topics. x ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS J. Don Read is Adjunct Professor of Psychology at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He is a cognitive psychologist who earned his PhD from Kansas State University. He has published numerous studies on a variety of aspects of eyewitness memory (e.g. naturalistic studies of eyewitness suspect identification). Read and Lindsay organized a 1996 NATO Advanced Studies Institute on issues related to the recovered- memories controversy, and co-edited a book that grew out of that meeting, entitled, Recollections of Trauma: Scientific Evidence and Clinical Practice (Plenum, 1997). Noelle Robertson is a chartered clinical psychologist in professional prac- tice and heads the Medical Psychology Unit at Leicester General Hospital. She has written widely on changing professional practice and guideline development and implementation. She is a Visiting Fellow at the Clinical Governance Research and Development Unit, Department of General Practice and Primary Health Care, Leicester University, England. Jonathan W. Schooler is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and a Research Scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center. He has published extensively on the mecha- nisms that lead to memory distortions in naturalistic settings, including examining the impact of post-event suggestion on event memories and assessing the disruptive consequences of verbalizing non-verbal memo- ries. More recently he has applied this interest to evaluating the accura- cies and inaccuracies of discovered memories of abuse. Katharine Shobe, PhD, is a Research Psychologist at the Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory in Groton, CT. She received her doctoral degree in cognitive psychology from Yale University. Her current research involves applied issues of learning, memory, and attention as related to training and performance issues aboard submarines. Adrian Skinner is Director of Clinical Psychology for Harrogate Health Care NHS Trust, North Yorkshire, England. He has published research in the areas of mental health, psychotherapy and neuropsychology. He is a former Chair of the Division of Clinical Psychology and presented a paper on recovered memories on the Division’s behalf at the European Congress of Psychology in 1997. ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS xi INTRODUCTION Graham M. Davies and Tim Dalgleish Recovered memories refers to the recall of traumatic events, typically of sexual abuse in childhood, by adults who have exhibited little or no pre- vious awareness of such experiences. The controversy over the reliability and veracity of such memories has not only split families, but also the psychological profession. The debate has continued, as much in the sober pages of scientific and professional journals, as in the public arenas of press, television and popular books. In the 1980s, this debate was charac- terised by proponents taking up extreme positions: either all such mem- ories were, by definition, inevitably false or, alternatively, any move to question such memories was a cynical attempt to deny victims their belated right to confront their abusers. By the mid-1990s, the terms of the debate began to change. The controversy remained fierce and the issues for its victims just as real, but it was now more reasoned, assisted by the availability of more and better research evidence. This seemed an appro- priate moment for a book which would draw together the researchers and professionals in an attempt to look at the evidence from a balanced per- spective. Recovered Memories: Seeking the Middle Ground is the result. If the terms of the debate have changed, recovered memories continue to be the cause of much stress and dissent for patients, families and their therapists. By 1996, the American-based False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), founded by a couple who believed themselves wrongly accused by their daughter of sexual abuse, had received over 7,000 enquiries and reported that there were some 700 repressed memory suits at trial level and a further 200 had reached the appeal stage (Johnston, 1997). FMSF has inspired similar organisations in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. The anguished parents and carers who contact such organisations complain that they are the victims of memories, which are not true fragments of the past, but rather [...]... allegations involves recovered memories Subsequent denial of these allegations and counter-accusations of ‘false memories’ of abuse echo the Freudian debate of a century ago The discourse of the accused 18 RECOVERED MEMORIES: SEEKING THE MIDDLE GROUND males of the modern age is littered with references to the gender issue (Pendergrast, 1996) The second societal theme that may bear upon the social representation... and films There has been a widespread establishment of self-help organisations and survivor groups These breakthroughs have been paralleled by formal changes in legislation, for example the Child Abuse and Treatment Act in 1973 in the USA 10 RECOVERED MEMORIES: SEEKING THE MIDDLE GROUND THE 1980S BACKLASH AND THE RECOVERED MEMORY DEBATE With a fin de siècle sense of déjà vu, the 1980s saw the emergence... little comfort to either wing of the debate, but did leave the great majority of conscientious therapists and clinical psychologists with considerable residual problems as to how to conduct themselves professionally in a way that was fair to the claims of their clients and at the same time did not encourage the manufacture of illusory experiences Recovered Memories: Seeking the Middle Ground is designed... experiencing, but rather in the fact that these descriptions rival any contemporary case studies of the effects of CSA Furthermore, this is the very interpretation that Freud himself makes of the cases he reviews To quote famously: I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest... to change in the 1970s coinciding with the emergence of the women’s movement and other social changes (see below), but now, with the recovered memory debate, there is some indication of a backlash against these more recent trends In the next section we touch on the possible reasons for this historical pattern FACTORS INVOLVED IN THE INTERMITTENT AMNESIA OF CSA What are the reasons for the pattern of... suppressed the distribution of his paper and the proofs of the English translation were destroyed (Olafson et al., 1993) With the exception of Ferenczi’s work, there is almost no published work on the consequences of CSA in the first 60 years of the twentieth century THE RESURGENCE OF INTEREST IN CSA IN THE LATE 1960S AND 1970S The late 1960s and 1970s witnessed a marked resurgence of the issue of CSA into the. .. extreme position with regard to their views on recovered memories What we do not know is the extent to which beliefs in the veracity or falsehood of recovered memories influence our perceptions of the potential consequences of the accusations for the families and the community at large In the present chapter the author presents data from the survey he conducted among members of the British False Memory Society... Charcot called hysteria the “great neurosis” and captured the public imagination by characterising the study of hysteria as an adventure into the unknown Famously, on a Tuesday, he would give a public lecture that 6 RECOVERED MEMORIES: SEEKING THE MIDDLE GROUND invariably involved the presentation of patients to a mixed audience of professionals and men and women of letters These visitors included... that, perhaps, the two spheres cannot be meaningfully distinguished or that the research and literature from each domain can potentially inform the other Similar ideas can be found in the social science literature In this section we examine the ideas from social psychology that bear on this issue of individual and collective denial, in an attempt 12 RECOVERED MEMORIES: SEEKING THE MIDDLE GROUND to shed... recantation of the seduction hypothesis allowed him to replace his ground- breaking ideas with a more publicly acceptable account; that hysterical patients’ descriptions of their experiences of CSA were untrue and, further, that they were fantasies which the patients had made up In contrast to the closely documented and minutely researched case studies that led to the development of the seduction hypothesis, . RECOVERED MEMORIES: SEEKING THE MIDDLE GROUND Recovered Memories: Seeking the Middle Ground. Edited by Graham M. Davies. at the evidence from a balanced per- spective. Recovered Memories: Seeking the Middle Ground is the result. If the terms of the debate have changed, recovered