False Memory Syndrome

Most sensible psychologists and counselors will agree that "recovered memories" of alien abductions and the kinky experiments that occurred while on a spaceship are not real - they are, instead, vivid creations of our minds while under the care of certain researchers who misuse their skills. But what about "recovered memories" sexual abuse? What's the difference between one and the other?

Nothing, according to most of those who are actively involved in researching the nature of the human mind and human memories. Both can be created during counseling sessions, but there isn't really any evidence that genuinely traumatic experiences are actually "repressed." Infobrix reports:

Now some researchers go further, arguing that it is impossible to have forgotten a truly traumatic event. All recovered memories are therefore necessarily false in the same way as memories of alien abduction. Richard McNally, professor of psychology at Harvard University, says: "The notion that the mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories of trauma, rendering them inaccessible to awareness, is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical evidence." McNally studied Vietnam veterans who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and concluded that their memories were all too clear and had never been forgotten. But research on people who claimed to have been abused during rituals of secret Satanic cults showed that most of them recovered the "memories" during psychotherapy. And when he studied people who believed they had been abducted by aliens, he found that the majority had undergone "quasihypnotic" memory recovery sessions.

Many lives have been irrevocably damaged because of unsubstantiated claims of sexual abuse that are based upon nothing but "recovered" memories. Those memories are surely traumatic - but the people to blame are not the accused abusers, but the therapists who have effectively engaged in a type of abuse by creating those memories in the first place. People with "recovered" memories have a right to be angry and to want justice - but they need to look to their therapists for that.

Read More:

• Repressed Memories
• Skepticism & Critical Thinking