SELECTED QUOTES RELEVANT TO
RECOVERED MEMORY THERAPY
From
a frontispiece in an article by Loftus, The Champion, March 1994:
"But
I don't want to go among abused people," Alice remarked.
"Oh,
you can't help that," said the Therapist:
"We
were all abused here.
I
was abused. You were abused."
"How
do you know I was abused?" said Alice.
"You
must have been," said the Therapist,
"or
you wouldn't have come here."
A
selection of quotes from Terence Campbell's book Beware the Talking Cure:
"If
the facts do not agree with the theory, so much the worse for the facts"
Georg Wilhelm Hegel
"Psychotherapists
do not know what they are doing and cannot train others to do it, whatever it
is" Cited by Arnold Lazarus
"Psychotherapy
is an undefined technique applied to unspecified problems with unpredictable
outcomes" Victor Raimy
"But
as profound as psychology is, it's a knife that cuts both ways" F. M.
Dostoevsky
"Minds
are like parachutes. They only function when they are open" Attributed to
James De War
"As
for doing good, that is one of the professions that are full" Henry David
Thoreau
"It
is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as
superstitions" Thomas Huxley
"Nothing
changes more than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not
consist of what actually happened, but what men believe happened" Gerald
W. Johnson
"I
pass from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and
Fact" Winston Churchill
"I'll
be the judge, I'll be the jury...I'll try the whole case" Lewis Carroll
"Ignorance
is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes
nothing than he who believes what is wrong" Thomas Jefferson
"One
hug from a family member is worth a hundred from a therapist" Carl Whitaker
"Loyalty
to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul" Mark
Twain
"You
see an analyst?" -- "Just for
fifteen years" Diane Keaton and Woody Allen
"Sentence
first -- verdict afterwards" Lewis Carroll
"The
world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel" Horace
Walpole
"...
we have to remember that what we observe is not nature itself, but nature
exposed to our method of questioning" Werner Heisenberg
"Nobody
who has not been in the interior of a family can say what the difficulties of
any individual of that family may be" Jane Austen
"One
of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea" Walter
Bagehot
"We
must learn to welcome and not to fear voices of dissent. We must dare to think
about 'unthinkable things' because when things become unthinkable, thinking
stops and action becomes mindless" J. William Fulbright
In
their 1994 book The Myth of Repressed Memory, Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine
Ketcham have chosen some brief and eloquent comments which lead into early
portions of the book. Some of them are
quoted here:
Dedicated to the principles of science, which demand that
any
claim to
"truth" be accompanied by proof
John Proctor:
There might also be a dragon with five legs
in my
house, but no one has ever seen it.
--- Arthur Miller, The Crucible
The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie--
deliberate,
contrived and dishonest--but the myth--
persistent,
persuasive, and unrealistic.
-- John F. Kennedy
"Most
of our so-called reasoning consists of finding reasons for believeing as we
already do" James Harvey Robinson
"It's
an indicium of witchcraft to defend witches, ..." Martin Del Rio (16th
century)
Joseph
Fouche, Napoleon's minister, made the following cynical assessment of the
execution of the Duke of Engheim: "It was worse than a crime: it was a
blunder."
Regarding
the development of FMS: "It's all happening out of the context of people
looking for sex abuse" Richard Ofshe
"Kids
never lie about being molested by their fathers, women never lie about this,
unless they accuse the wrong guy" Rush Limbaugh
"
... there is a high likelihood that the beliefs of the hypnotist will somehow
be communicated to the patient in hypnosis and incorporated into what the
patient believes are memories, often with strong conviction" Martin Orne
"...
nowadays many intellectual slobs and frauds have been given tenured jobs, are
allowed to teach garbage in the name of academic freedom, and see their
obnoxious writings published by scholarly journals and university
presses." Mario Bunge
"...
In what can only be called an incestuous arrangement, the authors of these
books all rely on the one another's work as supporting evidence for their work;
they all endorse and recommend one another's books to their readers. If one of them comes up with a concocted
statistic -- such as "more than half of all women are victims of childhood
sexual trauma" -- the numbers are traded like baseball cards, reprinted in
every book and eventually enshrined as fact.
Thus the cycle of misinformation, faulty statistics and invalidated
assertions maintains itself...." Carol Tavris
"...to
treat for repressed memories without any effort at external validation is
malpractice pure and simple..." Paul McHugh
"It
is well known that many 'memory retrieval' techniques are little more than
thinly disguised versions of hazardous hypnotic procedures." R.
Christopher Barden
"Free
association, guided imagery, relaxation techniques, repeated visualization,
'support group' probing, and the therapeutic context itself can, under certain
circumstances, in suitable subjects, work to facilitate the production of
pseudo-memories, or the filling of gaps in childhood memory, with fantasy or
narrative material.... The mechanisms
underlying these believed-in 'uncovering techniques' seem to share qualities
with, but are not necessarily identical to, hypnosis and self-hypnosis."
Martin Orne
"Experience
does not err; it is only your judgment that errs in promising itself results
which are not caused by your experiments" Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci
"...families
can and do survive real incest. But it
is very difficult to recover from imagined incest." Frank Pittman, III
Regarding
means for correcting the present problems inherent in recovered memory therapy:
"The 'treatment' requires public awareness, public indignation, and
massive media exposure. The
implementation of these measures--outside the confines of our offices--provides
us with the best help for a turnaround." Richard Gardner
Regarding
quoted statistics on the prevalence of sexual abuse of minor children:
"Like hydra heads or spreading kudzu, the false statistics keep
proliferating." Cathy Young
"Above
all, though many of the events of the decade seem to belong to another
world--to a party that lasted long but ended badly--the sixties remain a
tangible myth, a point of departure for every kind of social argument, as well
as the source of values widely diffused throughout our culture." Marcus
Dickstein
"For
no other system of thought in modern times, except the great religions, has
been adopted by so many people as a systematic interpretation of human
behavior." Alfred Kazin on Sigmund Freud
"Does
not every science in the end come to some kind of mythology?" Sigmund
Freud
"All
frauds, like the wall daubed with untempered mortar ... always tend to decay of
what they are devised to support." Richard Whately
"The
humblest citizen of all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause,
is stronger than all the hosts of error." William Jennings Bryant
"Instead
of a regard for truth, we have a regard for feelings." Wendy Kaminer
"There
is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe
"Psychiatry
is probably the single most destructive force that has affected the American
society within the last fifty years." Thomas Szasz
"With
a mass of irrefutable evidence, from the schools and universities, the media
and the law, Ms. Cheney exposes the 'dirty secret' behind the crisis in our culture--the
denial of truth." Gertrude Himmelfarb
Not
merely the validity of experience but the very existence of external reality
was tacitly denied by their philosophy.
The heresy of heresies was common sense." George Orwell, in 1984
"Any
attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective truth,
threatens in the long run every department of thought." George Orwell, in
"The Prevention of Literature"
"...
Janet Reno has refused Washington Gov. Mike Lowry's request to investigate the
'child sex abuse' witch-hunt in Wenatchee, Wash. The request met with a chilly
reception from Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hangs out with the people who
believe that 75 percent of parents sexually abuse their children." Paul
Craig Roberts
"Without
ever touching their victim, they move them as close as you can possibly get to
experience rape and brutalization ... And they get paid by the hour for doing
it." Richard Ofshe
"Strictly
speaking, the question is not how to get cured, but how to live." Joseph
Conrad
"The
greatest scandal of the century in American psychiatry...is the growing mania
among thousands of inept therapists, family counselors, and social workers for
arousing false memories of childhoood sexual abuse." Martin Gardner
"Lynne
Cheney's Telling the Truth is a
powerful, alarming but well-documented account of the war against truth and
objectivity being waged with considerable success by many among America's
intellectual elite. It is essential
reading for those who wish to understand the roots of so many of our social and
political problems." Donald Kagan
"There
is some hope therefore, that the liberal habit of mind which thinks of truth as
something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something
that you can make up as you go along, will survive." George Orwell in
"As I Please"
"Define
and create the reality that you want." Paul Begala
"Now
come the dreams with increasingly clear suggestions of abuse. These usually include abuse of other people
(not the dreamer) or animals, abused kittens and abused little girls or
boys. Then the survivor may dream of
watching or learning of the abuse of children of his or her gender, perpetrated
by figures that remind the dreamer of one of her family members. Then may come dreams in which the dreamer
clearly identifies herself as the victim and a particular family member(s) as
the abuser(s). A dreamer may even cry
out in her dreams 'It's my father. My
daddy did it.'" Gayle Delaney in Sexual Dreams
"Delgado
(1977) compiled various signs and symptoms, suggested by various mental health
professionals, indicating that a cult indoctrinee syndrome may be defined. Seen that way, the indoctrinee can be
considered the victim of a traumatic neurosis...." Margaret Thaler Singer
''Half
of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel
important. They don’t mean to do harm
-- but harm does not interest them. Or
they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless
struggle to think well of themselves.'' T. S. Eliot
''While
our awareness of childhood sexual abuse has increased enormously in the last
decade and the horrors of its consequences should never be minimized, there is
another side to this situation, namely that of the consequences of false
allegations where whole families are split apart and terrible pain inflicted on
everyone concerned. This side of the story needs to be told, for a therapist
may, with the best intentions in the world, contribute to enormous family
suffering.'' Harold Lief, M.D.
------------------------------------------
From
Frederick Crews' book The Memory Wars, page 209:
The work keeps on coming to a stop and they keep on
maintaining that this time nothing has occurred to them. We must not believe what they say, we must
always assume, and tell them too, that they have kept something back.... We
must insist on this, we must repeat the pressure and represent ourselves as
infalliable, till at last we are finally told something....There are cases,
too, in which the patient tries to disown [the memory] even after it's
return. "Something has occurred to
me now, but you obviously put it in my head."... In all such cases, I
remain unshakeably firm. I...explain to
the patient that [these distinctions] are only forms of his resistance and
pretexts raised by it against reproducing this particular memory, which we must
recognize in spite of all this. (Second Edition, 2:279-280)
Attributed
to Sigmund Freud, in Vol. 2 (of 24) of the Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey, Hogarth
Press, 1953-1974.
------------------------------------------
Inventing
or even defining postmodernism is very convenient to those who reject, or run
from the possibility of an absolute unchanging truth.
"Therapy
can easily fail to face up to the reality of sin in our lives. When therapy
replaces faith and when therapeutic techniques are seen as the total answer to
humanity's deepest needs and longings, another idolatry is introduced." Dr. George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury
July 31, 2000, Amsterdam. Reported in
The Times (UK) August 1, 2000.
"And
those, those were the days when you could smooch with college girls with
impunity . . . . nice girls wore crinolines, cinch belts, ankle bracelets, and
two-tone saddle shoes, and you could count on them not to sue you for sexual
harassment forty years later, their suppressed memories of date-rape retrieved
by lady psychoanalysts who shaved."
Mordecai Richler (Toronto author).
“In
recent years, we have become increasingly aware of the extent of child sexual
abuse in our society and have come to appreciate that there had been enormous
denial of this phenomenon. However, we
have also witnessed an exaggerated reaction to sexual abuse, so much so that
the term hysteria is often warranted.
The classical symptoms of hysteria are present: overreaction,
dramatization, emotional instability, impaired judgement, and attention seeking
behavior. The contagious spread of the
symptoms warrants the conclusion that we are dealing with mass hysteria.”
Richard Gardner
“A direct approach only strengthens a person in his[/her] illusion, and at the same time embitters him[/her]. There is nothing that requires such gentle handling as an illusion if one wishes to dispel it.” Soren Kierkegaard
"We're
a nation that developed a legal system based first and foremost on due process.
Of course we believe that it is important to punish evildoers, but we also have
to balance that with the need to protect the innocent. If we ever lost that
core element of our justice system, we will lose something that will ultimately
cause us a grief far greater than we have ever known." Elizabeth Loftus
"A lie
repeated often enough becomes the truth."
G. Goebbles
"...man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually
manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on." Winston S. Churchill
"Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from
earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most
spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century." Bertrand Russell
"I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in
pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning,
science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of
being true." Carl Sagan
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of
the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious
truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions
which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly
taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric
of their lives." Tolstoy
"In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know
that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they
would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them
again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because
scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day.
I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or
religion." Carl Sagan
"When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up
from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for
that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and
conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a
doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it
myself." Mark Twain
"Doubt everything or believe everything: these are two equally
convenient strategies. With either we dispense with the need for
reflection." Henri Poincare
"There is no better soporific and sedative than
skepticism." Nietzche
"All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed;
Second, it is violently opposed; and Third, it is accepted as
self-evident." Schopenhauer
"I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up
any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every
subject), as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it." Darwin
"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the
testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than
the fact which it endeavors to establish." David Hume
"Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his
self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvelous is
strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in
exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing
testified." Thomas H. Huxley
"..the real world's all we've got. Believers in the supernatural
claim to have special wisdom about the world. But real wisdom means knowing
truth from falsehood, knowing the difference between evidence and wishful
thinking. Yes, the real world is mysterious and sometimes frightening. But
would the supernatural make it better? The real world has beauty, poetry, love
and the joy of honest discovery. Isn't that enough?" John Stossel
"I know a lot of people without brains who do an awful lot of
talking." The Scarecrow -From the
Wizard of Oz
“Metaphysics:
An attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.” H. L.
Mencken
“If
you stick to any opinion long enough, it becomes respectable.” Bertrand Russell
“CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.” Ambrose Bierce, Devil's Dictionary
“A geat deal of intelligence can be invested in ignrance if the need ofr illuaion is deep.” Saul Bellow
"...the split between the research and practice wings of psychology has grown so wide that many psychologists now speak glumly of the 'scientist-practitioner gap,' although that is like saying there is an 'Arab-Israeli gap' in the Middle East. It is a war." Carol Tavris
----------------
"I can't believe that!" said Alice. "Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw along breath, and shut your eyes." Alice laughed. "There's no use trying." She said. "One can't believeimpossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." -- Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking-Glass
-----------------
"The most common of all follies is to believe
passionately in the palpably not true.
It is the chief occupation of mankind." -- H. L. Mencken
“Psychologists have known for 100 years that false
memories can be implanted using hypnosis." -- R. Christopher Barden